"Where HR and Finance move as one."
JISR (جسر), RIYADH — The word means "bridge." Founded in 2016 at the dawn of Vision 2030, the company set out to close the gap between two departments that rarely speak the same language: HR and Finance.
In most offices, HR and Finance work from different maps. One team hires, onboards and tracks attendance; the other pays salaries, files social insurance and reconciles expenses. Between them sits a fog of spreadsheets, portals and manual reconciliation. Jisr - Arabic for "bridge" - was built to remove that fog for businesses in Saudi Arabia, where the rules are specific and the tolerance for payroll errors is low.
Founded around 2016 by Mohammed Akkar Al-Johi, Jisr is a cloud platform that consolidates human resources, payroll, time and attendance, talent management and employee spend into a single system. Its defining feature is not a slick dashboard but plumbing: direct integrations with Saudi government portals - GOSI for social insurance, Mudad for payroll, Muqeem for residency - that let companies stay compliant without stitching systems together by hand. In October 2023, that focus paid off with a $30 million Series A led by Merak Capital, reported as the largest Series A for a SaaS company in the Middle East.
Figures are company-reported and approximate. Employee headcount is estimated at roughly 350-400, with 200+ staff on support and services across Riyadh, Dammam and Jeddah.
Jisr sells business software on a subscription basis - a classic B2B SaaS model - organized around the full employee lifecycle and, increasingly, the money that flows through it.
HRIS with digital employee profiles, automated payroll, time and attendance (biometric, mobile, geo-fencing), and compliance built for Saudi labor law.
Since 2016Recruitment/ATS, performance management, employee engagement, learning (Mawared Academy) and salary benchmarking to hire and grow teams.
Launched 2024Employee expense management and business travel - the piece that literally bridges HR and Finance in one system.
Launched 2025"When a SaaS company leads in localization, it's extremely unique and attractive."— Abdullah Altamami, CEO, Merak Capital (lead investor)
Saudi HR teams have long juggled fragmented employee data across government portals and spreadsheets. Payroll means reconciling GOSI, Mudad and WPS rules; onboarding means Muqeem residency checks. Jisr collapses that work into automated, compliant workflows.
International suites like Workday and SAP SuccessFactors are powerful but generic. Jisr's moat is fluency - native Arabic, native compliance, and direct government-portal integrations that competitors treat as afterthoughts. A dashboard can be copied in a week; that plumbing takes years.
Directional comparison for readability, not a benchmarked score.
Jisr serves thousands of organizations across roughly 16 sectors - from SMEs to enterprises in retail, technology, and government-adjacent industries. It sits at the center of Saudi Arabia's HR-tech wave, a market energized by Vision 2030's push to digitize and formalize the workforce. Its closest competitors include regional players such as Mawared HR, Qoyod, ZenHR, Bayzat and Palm HR, alongside global suites - but few match its depth of local government integration.
B2B SaaS. Recurring subscriptions priced by module and headcount, complemented by implementation and support delivered from offices in Riyadh, Dammam/Khobar and Jeddah.
Deep specialization in Saudi labor law, payroll compliance and government-portal integration - built on AWS cloud infrastructure for scale across MENA.
Mohammed Akkar Al-Johi launches Jisr in Riyadh to unify fragmented HR data for Saudi businesses.
The company scales as Saudi Arabia's modernization drive gathers momentum.
Early traction as businesses adopt the platform.
Direct connections for compliant payroll and workforce management.
End-to-end solutions from onboarding to offboarding.
The Middle East's largest SaaS Series A, led by Merak Capital.
Recruitment, performance, engagement, learning and salary benchmarking.
Expense and travel management, bridging HR and finance.
$30,000,000
Led by Merak Capital, with participation from Oqal. Reported as the largest Series A for a SaaS company in the Middle East.
Product expansion across Talent and Spend suites, regional growth beyond Saudi Arabia, and continued investment in localization and compliance - the capabilities investors called the company's edge.
Jisr is a cloud HR and finance platform for Saudi and MENA businesses, covering HRIS, payroll, time and attendance, talent management and employee spend, with built-in Saudi labor-law compliance.
Jisr (جسر) is Arabic for "bridge," reflecting the company's goal of bridging HR and Finance.
Jisr raised a $30 million Series A in October 2023, led by Merak Capital - reported as the largest SaaS Series A in the Middle East.
Its deep localization - native integrations with Saudi government portals like GOSI, Mudad and Muqeem, plus Arabic support and compliance with Saudi labor law - which global suites typically lack.
Thousands of organizations across roughly 16 sectors in Saudi Arabia and MENA, from SMEs to enterprises, with 800K+ employees on the platform.