Our Story

The Kourouian family of gold merchants and jewelers practiced their trade-in central Asia Minor since the 1800s. They acted as bullion gold suppliers to jewelry workshops, provided agricultural credit to farmers, and channeled surplus rural capital to financiers in the Ottoman capital.

In the early twentieth century the family led by Yacoub I Kourouian moved its gold trading operations to Egypt. In subsequent years, his son Krikour and grandson Yacoub II rebuilt the family’s fortune in Alexandria marked by the acquisition of Joseph & Alfred Youssoufian, the one-time appointed jeweler to the court of His Majesty King Farouk I of Egypt.

Yacoub’s son Rafy continues the family lineage, after a useful detour through another key aspect of finance: information, and more specifically online data. After heading the business section of the Middle East Times newspaper, Rafy rose to become MENA CEO for ISI Emerging Markets, the developing markets database arm of Euromoney Institutional Investor. With a region-wide business network and an “on the ground, dirt under the nails” understanding of Middle East economics and finance, Rafy envisaged Goldady as an efficient, online gold bullion investment platform.

In pursuit of his mission, Rafy has partnered with leading industry experts to launch Goldady: Chris Ioannou, financial risk analyst; A.J. Mekky, award-winning designer; Antonio Monteiro, chief technology officer.

At Goldady we are deploying financial technologies into the conventional gold souk, bringing it to the digital age to disrupt and transform the lucrative Middle Eastern gold bullion market.