Our AGC chapter’s outreach & strategic advisor Tarek El Aouji, BCT’25 won alongside his brother Jad El Aouji, EE’26 the regional Hult Prize Competition at UMass Amherst in 2023 for their carpooling app called Reela. Started three years ago in Lebanon and now launching in the U.S., Reela aims to change how people move and discover places and friends.
1. What’s a short explanation of your venture?
If you ever see a fun group of people – who just met – ridesharing together going everywhere and literally becoming best friends, know this: they probably matched by scrolling on Reela. The app is a global decentralized transportation platform for every university’s students, company’s employees, and community’s members. It’s how you meet new people, rediscover friends, date and find co-founders… all types of meaningful and lasting relations, while everyday riding 4 times more sustainably and at lower transport costs.
2. How does your venture work?
We connect riders from the same community to match to carpool.
For example, if it’s Thanksgiving Break and no one’s left at UMass, typically Olivia used to drive her car alone for 2 hours to her parents in Waltham. Others like Ted and Brian transferred between 3 buses for over 3 hours while Jenny had her parents drive back-and-forth to get her and bring her back on campus, yet surprisingly all of them live in Waltham 5 min apart! Reela is their new way to discover about each other. Olivia can now post her ride on Reela UMass, and in one tap, match with three new peers and enjoy together the best 2 hours ride and conversations of their semester!
Reela leads to up to 80% savings on transport costs and facilitates payments. Every day, it forms a fleet-like pool of carpool rides from the same community allowing the most convenient, least expensive & most sustainable form of transport. Reela is not only fun, sustainable & more affordable but also a community builder of close friends and like-minded thinkers.
3. How did you get the idea for your venture?
“Reela started from the will to do good, not to make money,” says Tarek. “In Lebanon, as fuel prices skyrocketed, students began to have trouble affording transportation, and I wanted to find a way to be the change.”
This is the case of hundreds of millions of people yet is a solvable problem, and from the belief that necessity is the mother of invention when times get tough, we don’t give up, we get up.
Tarek spearheaded building the social entrepreneurial startup. Along the way, some amazing people joined to lead the development of something great.
How has your background in construction influenced your development and vision of Reela?
While architecture is the art of dreaming things that never were, and saying, ‘Why not’? construction is the art of turning dreams into reality.
Tarek sees his background in both Building and Construction Technologies (BCT) and Architecture as the art mastery that goes way beyond buildings to a foundational instruments in shaping Reela. The problem-solving skills honed while studying construction and architecture—such as considering site constraints, optimizing designs for efficiency, and thinking systematically about how different components of a project fit together—have directly influenced the way to approach the development of Reela. In both construction and transportation, you have to connect the dots and think about how people interact together and with the built environment, and how systems can be designed to improve those interactions. Reela is about creating a more efficient, community-focused transportation system.
5. How are you readying for Reela’s coming launch?
There’s lots of hard work backing any success equation. Ours is getting prepared; slow is smooth and smooth is fast. There is a team of relentless people behind the scenes of Reela currently taking care of every final detail it needs before the loud launch.
It’s been everyday developing, designing, coding, testing, planning, cybersecuring, legal drafting, meetings, data analysis, research, innovating, operations management, and user experience optimization. This has gone far enough today to say confidently that Reela has a decent shot at succeeding in business.
UMASS BE READY TO REELA!
Reela is live and you’re officially invited to see what’s new.
Download on the App Store today.
