Every platform promised to set people free — then kept the profit. Direct Global builds the ones that don’t: co-operatively owned businesses that hand equity, governance, and profit back to the workers and small firms who create the value.
We don’t fight the platform economy. We rebuild it with the cap table turned upside down.
The gig platforms were sold as liberation. In practice they consolidated power and pushed the cost of it downward.
Direct Global seeds platform co-operatives: enterprise-grade technology with ownership structured for the members from day one.
Most people pitching “platform co-operatives” are two years old. Buying.Coop is the endpoint of a documented 25-year lineage — from a Toronto buying group to a UN-backed marketplace. Here is the road that led to it.
Founder Ahmed Attia builds a platform letting businesses in developing nations trade commodities by barter instead of scarce foreign currency. Later scaled as Unibex, partnering with the American Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers.
The direct ancestor of Buying.Coop: an internet buying group that pools small businesses to win the enterprise pricing normally reserved for big-box chains. Named for Toronto’s area code — a neighbourhood idea with a global thesis inside it.
Buying.Coop lineage begins416Direct joins the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) and is presented at a federal-budget press event with the Minister of State for Finance — a neighbourhood buying group, recognized in national small-business policy. The two go on to co-host the “Meeting of the Minds” workshop series for SME owners.
Through the CFIB, 416Direct partners with Bloomberg Media and joins the national “Shop Small Biz” campaign — assembling the credibility and reach a buying group needs to negotiate like an enterprise on behalf of its members.
Direct Co-ops soft-launches on Earth Day at the Ritz-Carlton — attended by three Ontario cabinet ministers and the Saudi Canadian Business Council. The buying-group model becomes a co-operative, the immediate parent of Buying.Coop. That same year, 519Direct proves the model ports from one city to the next.
The co-operative model, formalizedA discrete local project becomes a global platform — 15,000+ participating businesses — and is profiled on Bloomberg-BNN in North America.
Featured on Bloomberg-BNNNCBA-CLUSA, America’s oldest co-operative association, partners with Direct Global on a global commerce platform for co-ops. The member-owned B2B marketplace that becomes Buying.Coop begins here as a pilot — two decades of buying-group work, finally going online.
NCBA-CLUSA pilotThe United Nations backs Direct Global’s work on the Sustainable Development Goals, and NOW Toronto asks whether the co-op model can help local business compete with Amazon and Uber. Buying.Coop launches as the answer — a collective-purchasing marketplace built on 25 years of proof.
The buying group, realizedWith the purchasing co-operative proven, Direct Global seeds two more member-owned platforms: Fare.Coop for ride-hailing and FareEats / Direct Local Eats for food delivery.
Fare.Coop becomes the third-largest fully licensed rideshare in the United States, live across Arizona, California, Georgia, Florida, Massachusetts and Oregon. The duopoly cracks.
The duopoly breaksFare.Coop launches SecureRide™ with HUB Cyber Security (Nasdaq: HUBC) — the world’s first perpetually verified rideshare — and becomes the #9 most-played commercial on US national radio.
The future, verifiedA venture fund owns its portfolio. We seed ours and give it away. Every platform below is a real, operating business — governed and increasingly owned by its own members.
A multi-stakeholder co-operative where drivers hold 50% of ownership and earn up to 90% of every fare. Riders save ~20% vs. Uber & Lyft.
Members nominate and vote products to a 1,000-vote threshold, then unlock enterprise pricing together across eight sectors.
Driver-owned delivery in every city. Restaurants pay as little as 5% versus 20–35% elsewhere; drivers keep 90% of fees plus 100% of tips.
Track the stories, people and ideas gaining momentum across the industries you follow — with evidence-backed relevance signals that look beyond follower counts.
Fare.Coop is a multi-stakeholder federated co-operative. Fifty percent of total ownership belongs to drivers — written into the legal DNA of the company, not promised in a pitch deck.
Members turn collective demand into leverage through a transparent, democratic pipeline. When a product clears the threshold, suppliers compete for the order.
Traditional rideshare vets a driver once, then hopes. Fare.Coop built the world’s first perpetually verified platform: continuous, real-time checks on every ride, every time — not an annual snapshot.
Verified drivers earn 20–30% more per ride, because riders pay a premium for a ride they can trust.
Continuous monitoring of license status, violations and eligibility — not once a year.
Riders are verified continuously too, so both sides of every trip are accountable.
Real-time checks against OFAC, UN and EU sanction lists — live, not static.
Every SecureRide™ vehicle keeps a verifiable, tamper-resistant record.
Direct Global is the Canadian strategic partner to the Commonwealth Enterprise & Investment Council and an e-commerce partner to NCBA-CLUSA — America’s oldest co-operative association, representing one in three Americans.
Recognized by the United Nations for advancing the Sustainable Development Goals, and profiled in “Everything for Everyone,” Nathan Schneider’s definitive text on the platform co-operative movement.
“In just nine months, Fare Co-op rose to become America’s third-largest rideshare — something no other startup, co-operative or corporate, has ever done. And soon, through our model, drivers will even own the driverless vehicles that were meant to replace them.”
Founders, directors and advisors drawn from the institutions Direct Global’s platforms are now disrupting — the Toronto Stock Exchange, the Canadian Space Agency, the United Nations, and beyond. Tap any card to read the full bio.
Whether you drive, run a business, lead a union, or want to seed a co-operative in a new sector — there’s a way in.
