The clipboard had survived another technological revolution. Inside the office, information moved through software. Outside it, people still made calls, passed instructions over radios and filled in forms. Rami Darwish had spent years working on large technology projects when this arrangement began to bother him. An organization could buy sophisticated systems and still lose the thread the moment a task reached someone in the field. The final stretch of its digital journey was being completed in handwriting.
Darwish knew the problem from the inside. Before founding Arrow Labs in Dubai in 2011, he worked in technical and business roles at companies including Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard and Daon. His work encompassed city safety systems, biometric border management, airports and maritime security. These were projects with substantial infrastructure and consequential jobs to do. Yet communication between the people directing operations and the people carrying them out could fall back on decidedly ordinary tools.
“It drove me crazy,” he said of the disconnect. It is a useful place to begin his story. His opportunity grew out of a recurring irritation in work he already understood. The grand equipment was there. The person who needed an instruction, or had an observation to report, could still be several phone calls away from the information system.
01 An economist among the systems
Darwish comes from Jordan and studied at the University of Kansas, earning a bachelor’s degree in economics with a focus on management information systems. That combination puts business and the movement of information in the same frame. His subsequent career would bring him into the practical details of both: designing technology and understanding how an organization expected to use it.
His corporate years also gave him experience with public-sector infrastructure. A city project connects databases and control rooms to streets, workers and physical assets. Information has to travel in both directions. An instruction must reach the right person; a report must return with enough accuracy to be useful. A control room may have an impressive view of a city while knowing surprisingly little about the progress of a particular job.
In explaining his decision to start Arrow Labs, Darwish repeatedly returned to that uneven distribution of tools. Office staff had software to help them organize work. Field staff had paperwork to prove they had done it. The burden was especially awkward for people whose principal job involved installing, maintaining, inspecting or repairing something. Administration could compete with the very activity it was meant to support.
“It drove me crazy.”
Rami Darwish, on the gap between office systems and field operations
02 Seven years before the wider launch
Arrow Labs began in 2011. Its MIMS cloud platform reached the market in 2018, after years spent developing the product with early adopters. Those two dates matter together. A founding date can sound like an opening-night announcement; here it was the beginning of an extended period of construction.
Darwish spent time with prospective customers and teams in different industries to understand their working problems. The company established a research and development center in 2013. Products were available to customers during the following years, but he continued to regard much of that period as development. The ambition was enterprise software that could hold up inside large organizations, where a promising demonstration is only the beginning of the conversation.
Dubai Ports and DP World became early customers. Darwish’s previous work in the public sector helped him reach them. Their involvement gave the developing product a setting in which the distance between an office instruction and a field action was quite literal. Ports contain equipment, people, incidents and schedules, all of which have the unfortunate habit of moving at once.
Early customer access did not make the rest of the job easy. Darwish has described the difficulty of winning organizations accustomed to buying technology from established companies. Arrow Labs built flexibility into MIMS so customers could connect it with systems they already had. For a young supplier, fitting into an existing operation could be more persuasive than asking the customer to start over.
03 A watch with a job to do
MIMS developed into a combination of web software, mobile applications, wearables and connected devices. The company introduced its watch in 2019, followed by an engine for bringing machine data into the platform in 2020. Each addition addressed a practical part of fieldwork: how people receive instructions, how they report back and how equipment can contribute information without someone having to transcribe it.
The watch is a telling detail in Darwish’s approach. A smartphone gives a worker access to software, but it can also be awkward to handle during a task. A wearable offers another way into the same workflow. Technology designed for someone seated at a desk has the luxury of assuming an available screen and free hands. Out in the field, that assumption deserves a second look.
Darwish’s maritime work supplies a concrete example. At the Port of Tampa Bay, MIMS has been used for incident reporting, security operations and coordination. Electronic records can capture where an incident occurred, which shift was involved and what duties were assigned. The value lies in making those details available to the different people responsible for responding, rather than leaving each to assemble a separate account.
He has also described the system as a way for workers to see and record their own contributions. That aspiration matters alongside the management view. A tool that tracks a workforce enters the daily relationship between supervisors and staff. Darwish’s stated case for it includes greater self-reliance for the worker, as well as better coordination for the organization.
A simplified explanation of the platform’s workflow, rather than a product interface.
04 The investor enters a working business
In July 2021, Arrow Labs announced a $5 million Series A led by Draper Associates, with Global Ventures and B&Y Ventures participating. Tim Draper’s involvement gave the company a connection to an investor known for backing technology businesses internationally. For Darwish, the funding was tied to expanding an existing operation and developing the product’s machine-learning capabilities.
Global Ventures had been backing the team since 2018. Its partner Noor Sweid described Darwish as an example of an emerging-market founder building technology with regional and global potential. The geography was part of the argument: a company developed in Dubai could address a working problem shared by organizations far beyond it.
Darwish had bootstrapped the business before bringing in venture capital. That history helps explain his account of fundraising as a decision about timing. The company already had customers and a product; additional capital could support expansion, particularly in the United States, and further technical development. His story contains the quieter work that comes before an investment announcement: earning enough confidence from customers for a larger plan to become credible.
05 Intelligence measured in an assigned task
Darwish describes artificial intelligence in unusually operational terms. The problems include allocating technicians, planning capacity, assigning work orders and accounting for travel. A schedule has to consider who has the relevant skills, where they are and what equipment the job requires. A booking that looks neat on a screen may be less impressive when someone has to drive to it.
MIMS Optimise brings several of those decisions together. The platform also follows response, arrival and resolution times against service agreements. This is a version of AI whose usefulness depends on the next assignment being workable. For the customer, the immediate question is whether the right person can reach the right place with the information and equipment required.
Darwish has discussed these ideas publicly through interviews, demonstrations and podcasts. In 2022, he contributed to the Economist Impact Innovation@Work discussion about introducing AI to field teams. In 2023, he appeared on Rajae Sahouri’s The Straight Up Start Up to discuss deskless work and the region’s startup environment. His recurring subject remained the ordinary working day that enterprise technology had been slow to reach.
06 An airport brings the idea back to Jordan
By late 2025, a project at Queen Alia International Airport offered another expression of the original idea. The airport’s Smart Cleaning System won the ACI World-Amadeus Technology Innovation Award for Best Innovation in Airport Operations and Installations Management. Airport International Group led the initiative, with MENA Facilities Management delivering the service and Arrow Labs providing the MIMS platform.
The system connects operational information, including passenger patterns and flight schedules, with the allocation of cleaning resources. Four cleaning robots formed part of the airport’s wider technology setup. Here, the fieldwork problem is familiar to anyone who has walked through a busy terminal: demand changes throughout the day, and a fixed schedule cannot tell the whole story.
The award belonged to the airport, and the work involved several partners. Darwish’s response emphasized that collaboration. For a founder from Jordan who had built his company in Dubai, the project also placed his software in a recognizable setting back in his country of origin. The connection is geographical and practical, without needing a more elaborate homecoming story.
His stated ambition remains to give deskless workers better access to useful technology. That is a broad aim, tested in small exchanges: an instruction delivered, a report captured, a job assigned with the necessary context. Darwish began by noticing how often information stopped at the office door. Years later, the work still turns on helping it finish the journey.