Ms. Yahyaoui’s compelling background helped her stand out among entrepreneurs when she moved in 2018 to San Francisco, where she founded a student aid start-up called Mos.
The app hit the top of Apple’s App Store and Ms. Yahyaoui raised $56 million from high-profile investors, including Sequoia Capital, John Doerr and Steph Curry, according to PitchBook, which tracks start-ups.
In podcasts, TV interviews and other media, Ms. Yahyaoui, 39, frequently discussed Mos’s success.
But internal company data viewed by The New York Times showed that as of early last year, only about 30,000 customers had paid for Mos’s student aid services.
Less than 10 percent of Mos’s roughly 153,000 bank users had put their own money into their accounts, the data showed.
Persons:
Amira Yahyaoui, Yahyaoui, John Doerr, Steph Curry, Mos
Organizations:
Sequoia Capital, The New York Times, TechCrunch
Locations:
Tunisian, Algerian, San Francisco