The order arrived online. The glasses were downstairs. In eyewa’s early days, Mehdi Oudghiri and Anass Boumediene would receive a purchase through their website, go to the shop in their building, buy the frames and send them to the customer. A business that would eventually operate across the Gulf began with a supply chain short enough to walk. There are more glamorous ways to describe entrepreneurship. Few explain the job quite so neatly.
By 2017, Oudghiri had already worked in consulting and helped run a food delivery business. He knew about strategy, expansion and the machinery of a startup. Nevertheless, starting his own company meant returning to the elementary question: could he get a product into somebody’s hands? The website made a promise. Somebody had to go downstairs and keep it.
That little journey is a useful place to begin a profile of eyewa’s co-founder and co-CEO. Funding rounds make a company legible to investors. Store openings make it visible to shoppers. The space between those announcements contains the work Oudghiri had wanted to get closer to: decisions followed by consequences, with customers entitled to an opinion.
California, then back to Dubai
Oudghiri is Moroccan. His working life took him to Dubai, where he began consulting at Bain & Company in 2009. His education crossed several countries: a business bachelor’s degree at ESSEC in Paris, a management bachelor’s degree at Tongji in Shanghai, and an MBA at Stanford. His public career biography also includes product management at Valeo in China. Before eyewa, there was already a habit of moving between places and kinds of work.
Stanford changed the direction of that career. Being surrounded by entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley made building a company feel like something he wanted to do himself. He chose to bring that ambition back to the Middle East. The attraction was the region’s opportunity and the prospect of helping its startup ecosystem develop. California supplied the encouragement; Dubai supplied a place to act on it.
He returned to Bain for a few months and met Boumediene. Their next step had an element no business-school case study can reliably manufacture: coincidence. While working on the same project in Saudi Arabia, they were approached separately by Rocket Internet, interviewed separately and both recruited to lead Foodpanda’s regional business. They joined in 2015. An existing working relationship came along for the ride.
Food delivery offered an education in operations. Their regional work included businesses such as HungerStation in Saudi Arabia and Otlob in Egypt. Delivery Hero acquired Foodpanda in December 2016. After the acquisition, Oudghiri and Boumediene arranged a transition and prepared to build something of their own. They had acquired experience together, which is a rather more useful qualification for a partnership than simply enjoying the same lunch.
The second order
Choosing their own venture involved a distinctly consultant-like exercise. Over roughly six months, the pair examined 87 ideas against 15 criteria. They considered problems in the region, models working elsewhere and the sort of business they wanted to spend their time building. Eyewear emerged from that process. The origin story had a spreadsheet before it had a shopfront.
The founders both wore glasses. They could approach the category as shoppers as well as analysts. Eyewa launched online in October 2017, initially backed by their savings, and secured $1.1 million in seed investment soon afterwards. Its first working environment was their Dubai apartments. There was no need to wait for an impressive office before finding out whether people would buy.
Oudghiri’s explanation of early confidence was practical. Acquiring a customer through a website and marketing could establish demand. Returning customers told him something more useful about whether the business could last. People who bought again had experienced the service and elected to repeat it. The repeat purchase was a customer’s assessment, delivered without the trouble of scheduling a meeting.
He describes himself as an introvert and Boumediene as an extrovert. They share Moroccan roots and an analytical consulting background, but he has said their different opinions can produce constructive arguments. That gives their partnership some texture. A shared résumé does not mean a shared temperament, and a company has plenty of decisions worth examining twice.
“I’m more of an introvert”
Mehdi Oudghiri, 2019
The quieter founder still wanted the direct responsibility of operating. His dissatisfaction with consulting was about the distance from implementation. Setting a direction could be rewarding, but execution belonged to somebody else. At eyewa, the founders would have to discover whether their recommendations survived contact with a parcel, a price tag and a customer who might never return.
A shop is a place to listen
In April 2019, eyewa raised a $7.5 million Series A led by Wamda Capital. Its team had grown from two people to 25. Oudghiri’s thinking about online competition was more nuanced than a simple battle against generalist marketplaces. He argued that large platforms could help people become comfortable buying online, after which specialist retailers could offer expertise in a particular category.
That argument leaves room for several kinds of retailer to exist. A general store introduces the habit; a specialist gives someone a reason to shop more selectively. For eyewa, building a recognisable offering also meant developing its own products. By 2021, house brands included 30Sundays and Blackout. Product choice became another part of the business the founders could shape.
Physical stores were part of their intended direction from the beginning. When eyewa raised its $21 million Series B in June 2021, Oudghiri explained the move into retail through proximity to customers. Online had been the starting point because he saw an opening there. Shops would extend the business to people and shopping habits that a website alone could not reach.
“We want to be as close as possible to our customers.”
Mehdi Oudghiri, 2021
That is a straightforward sentence for an idea often buried under retail terminology. A person can browse on a phone and still want to put a pair of frames on their face. A store can make a brand familiar; a website can remain convenient afterwards. The business has to accommodate those choices rather than ask shoppers to adopt its preferred theory of commerce.
The move also brought the company into a different sort of competition. Its products would sit in shopping centres alongside established retailers. A digital beginning did not remove the practical demands of operating shops. It added another setting in which the founders’ decisions could be tested, this time with a door the customer could walk through.
From a staircase to a store network
Eyewa’s first physical store opened in December 2020, according to its later investment announcement. The early retail footprint was in Saudi Arabia, followed by the UAE. By November 2021, a contemporary account described ten stores in Saudi Arabia and two in Dubai. The company was putting physical addresses behind an idea that had started online.
There were good reasons to be careful about treating the Gulf as a single, effortless market. Boumediene pointed to differences in currencies, taxes, customs and regulations. A common language did not make every border disappear. Stores and local operations became part of how eyewa built a presence in different places. Expansion required more than enlarging a delivery map.
In November 2024, eyewa announced a $100 million Series C led by General Atlantic, with Badwa Capital and Turmeric Capital participating. The announcement described a footprint of more than 150 GCC locations. It set out intentions to invest in research and development, recruit talent and add at least 100 stores during 2025. A production and fulfilment hub in Riyadh was also planned.
Those intentions give the capital a practical context. New products need people to develop them. New shops need stock. A regional retailer has to connect what customers see with what the business can deliver. The proposed Riyadh facility represented a much longer and more deliberately organised supply chain than the trip downstairs.
By August 2025, investor Hardy Capital reported the opening of eyewa’s 200th store, at Villaggio Mall in Qatar. It was the 42nd opening that year. The footprint then included Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Qatar. This dated milestone shows how far the physical business had travelled without turning an expansion target into an accomplished fact.
The funding announcement also named Abdullah AlRugaib as co-founder and managing director. Eyewa’s operating story extends beyond the two people in its early anecdotes. A company moving across countries depends on a wider leadership team and the people running its daily work. The founders’ names open the story; they cannot explain every shop.
The people who might leave
Oudghiri’s ambitions include a result that will eventually take people away from eyewa. Asked which startup he wished he had started, he chose Careem because of its contribution to the region’s entrepreneurial talent. He said he would be proud to see eyewa employees start ventures or take significant roles elsewhere with the experience they had gained.
That is an appealing way to think about a company’s influence. Its products can travel in parcels. Its lessons travel with people. A colleague who learns to build a team, handle customers or expand into another market can carry that experience into a business whose name has yet to be chosen.
He has also described the personal cost of entrepreneurship: tighter limits on time and money, less time available for family, and reliance on his wife’s support. In 2019, he spoke of the energy of being a young father. The account makes room for the life around the company, the part a funding chart has little chance of representing.
Asked about lessons, he identified resilience, discipline and hard work. These are ordinary words with a demanding schedule attached. In this career, they connect the ambition stirred at Stanford to the next order, the next hire and the next shop. The distance is covered through individual decisions that have to work for other people.
Oudghiri wanted to see what happened after the advice. Eyewa gave him that opportunity, beginning with an online order and a trip downstairs. Years later, the addresses are more numerous and the organisation more complicated. The original obligation is still easy to understand: someone has chosen to buy, and the business must make that choice worth repeating.