saudi-arabia
(55)
KenKo Ventures is building the startup room outside Cairo
In Egypt’s Nile Delta, KenKo Ventures runs the workshops, mentoring and hub operations that help founders get started. Its next proposition connects that local work to business growth across Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
The Garage traded parking spaces for startup runway
Inside a former Riyadh car park, The Garage brings founders, laboratories and investors into the same orbit. Its most useful promise is practical: help a young technology business get from a working idea to a paying market.
Sanabil Investments Has $3 Billion a Year to Put to Work. It Also Has Homework.
The PIF-owned investor connects global private capital with Saudi company building. Its expanding roster of accelerators and venture studios reveals why writing the check is only part of the job.
Chalhoub Greenhouse Gives Startups a Way Into the Store
The luxury retailer’s venture builder pairs founders with grants, working retail channels and people who can say yes. Its real test comes when the pilot ends.
Parachute16 knows the jump. Now it builds the landing.
After eight earlier ventures, Ghassan Halawa built a company to help other founders. From Palestinian startups entering Saudi Arabia to PepsiCo’s youth hackathons, Parachute16 makes a business of getting people ready for their next move.
Wadi Makkah wants university ideas to earn their keep
Owned by Umm Al-Qura University, Wadi Makkah turns research, educational know-how and campus assets into commercial ventures. Its most revealing market is close to home: the businesses serving Hajj and Umrah.
Business Hub gives the five-minute pitch somewhere to grow
From a Medina startup contest to an Oman joint venture, Business Hub connects the practical parts of entrepreneurship: a place to work, people to learn from, and a room in which to make the ask.
OCEANX sells the work behind Saudi Arabia’s startup ambition
The Riyadh consultancy has moved from helping young businesses to running the programs around them. Its mix of incubators, management advice and Arabic research offers a close look at how economic ambition becomes a working brief.
STV wants founders to keep more of what they build
The Riyadh investor built its name backing regional tech companies. Now, callable equity and a Google-backed AI fund are widening its answer to a stubborn question: how should a startup pay for growth?
Mobily sells phone plans. Its bigger bet is under the surface.
The company that broke Saudi Arabia’s mobile monopoly is building a business in fiber, data centers and cables beneath the Red Sea. Getting there has meant a costly license, an accounting reckoning and a new test of what a telecom operator can sell.
Floward’s $190 million bet: the bouquet is only the beginning
The Kuwait-born company built its flower business around controlling the delivery. Now perfumes, robotic vending machines and prepaid gift cards are widening its ambitions - and the job of keeping its promises.
COGNNA Is Teaching the Security Operations Center to Think Before It Pings
The Saudi cybersecurity company is betting that the next useful AI agent will not write an email. It will decide which of 10,000 security alerts deserves a human being.
CarSwitch Put a 200-Point Checklist Between Dubai and a Bad Deal
Dubai's used-car problem was never a shortage of listings. It was the awkward, expensive gap between finding a vehicle and trusting the deal - the gap CarSwitch built a business to manage.
palm.hr
palm.hr is a Riyadh-born, cloud-based HR and payroll platform built for small and mid-sized businesses across Saudi Arabia and the wider GCC. It brings employee data, time and attendance, WPS-compliant payroll, and employee engagement into one system that plugs directly into local government rails like GOSI and Mudad, so companies can run people operations that comply with regional labor law out of the box. Founded in 2019, it raised a $5M pre-Series A in 2023 to expand across MENA and pairs its software with an outsourced HR concierge service.
Jeeny Is Turning the Ride-Hailing App Into the Trip Itself
The Saudi-Jordanian app began by making taxis easier to find. Now it is stitching rides, parcels, payments, advertising and travel into one regional mobility layer - while trying to keep the economics attractive on both sides of the car door.
Bonat
The Riyadh startup that turns a coffee-shop punch card into a data engine - and just raised $6 million to teach every merchant in the Gulf how to keep a customer.
Baytonia
Behind a single furniture storefront in Saudi Arabia sits a marketplace that also warehouses, assembles and delivers - and quietly furnishes hotels, offices and government projects for the sellers who can't.
Democrance
Democrance is a Dubai-based B2B insurtech that sells insurers a lightweight, cloud-based core platform - Democrance Pulse - which sits on top of legacy systems rather than replacing them. Founded in 2015 by Michele Grosso, Alberto Perez and Dr. Damian Dimmich, the company began by trying to sell low-cost microinsurance to people in emerging markets who had never held a policy, then discovered that the real bottleneck was the insurers' own technology. Today its no-code product configurator, distribution portals, underwriting engine and API library let carriers including AXA, MetLife, AIG, Manulife, Zurich, Tokio Marine and Sukoon launch and administer life, health and P&C products in days rather than months, across 15-plus markets in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America. The mainstream book cross-subsidises the microinsurance one, which is how a financial-inclusion mission survives contact with a P&L.
eyewa
eyewa is the Middle East's largest omnichannel eyewear retailer, selling prescription glasses, sunglasses, blue light glasses and contact lenses through its e-commerce platform, mobile app and a growing network of physical stores across the GCC. Founded in Dubai in 2017 by former Bain consultants Anass Boumediene and Mehdi Oudghiri, the company pairs affordable in-house brands with technology like AI-powered virtual try-on, and reached roughly 150 stores before raising a $100M Series C led by General Atlantic in late 2024 to fund a 100-store expansion.
HALA
HALA is a Riyadh-based fintech building the 'bank of the future' for small and medium enterprises across Saudi Arabia and the wider MENA region. Founded in 2018 by Esam AlNahdi and Maher Loubieh, it combines business IBAN accounts, card issuance, POS and soft-POS payment acceptance, expense management and SME financing into a single platform regulated by the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA). HALA serves more than 140,000 businesses, processes over $8 billion in annual transactions, and in September 2025 raised a $157 million Series B - one of the largest fintech Series B rounds in the Middle East - at a reported valuation near $900 million.
Holo
Holo is a Dubai-based digital mortgage platform that lets home buyers and homeowners compare, apply for and track mortgages across 20+ banks in one place. Founded in 2020 by mortgage veterans Michael Hunter and Arran Summerhill, it pairs proprietary automation software with human advisors to cut the paperwork and opacity out of home financing. The company is profitable in the UAE, has helped tens of thousands of clients, processes over AED 1 billion in applications monthly, and raised a $22M Series A in 2025 to expand across Saudi Arabia and the wider GCC.
Intelmatix
Intelmatix is a deep-tech enterprise AI company founded by MIT-trained technologists that builds EDIX, an Enterprise Decision Intelligence Platform designed to act as a 'digital brain' for organizations. Using context-aware AI agents, knowledge graphs and generative AI, EDIX lets companies sense, learn, decide and act across functions like demand forecasting, inventory, workforce planning and site selection - without needing an in-house data science team. Headquartered in Riyadh with offices in London and Boston, Intelmatix focuses on the MENA region, training on local context data that global platforms overlook. It raised a $20M Series A in 2024 - the region's largest AI Series A of its kind - and in 2025 became the first Saudi and MENA AI company named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer.
Jisr | جسر
Jisr (جسر, Arabic for 'bridge') is a Riyadh-based HR and finance software company building a cloud platform that unifies HR, payroll, talent and spend for businesses in Saudi Arabia and the wider MENA region. Founded in 2016-2017 as Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 got underway, Jisr localizes its product deeply - integrating directly with government portals like GOSI, Mudad and Muqeem so companies can run compliant payroll and workforce operations. In October 2023 it raised a $30 million Series A led by Merak Capital, reported as the largest Series A for a SaaS company in the Middle East. The platform is used by thousands of organizations processing billions of riyals in payroll.
لبيه | Labayh
Labayh is a Saudi digital mental-health platform that connects Arabic-speaking users with licensed psychologists, psychiatrists and counselors for private, remote therapy delivered through its mobile app. Founded in 2018 by Basim Albeladi after his own experience with PTSD, the platform offers one-on-one sessions, group support, therapeutic programs, self-assessments and a corporate wellbeing product, and has grown to more than a million users served by a large network of licensed specialists across the MENA region.
Lucidya | لوسيديا
Lucidya is a Riyadh-based, AI-native customer experience management (CXM) platform built for Arabic-speaking markets. Using a proprietary Arabic NLP engine that understands 15+ dialects with roughly 92% sentiment accuracy, it unifies social listening, media monitoring, surveys, customer profiles and omnichannel support into a single system, and now deploys autonomous AI agents for customer-facing roles. Founded in 2016 by Abdullah Asiri and co-founders, the company serves enterprises and governments across the MENA region and in 2025 raised a $30M Series B, one of the largest AI funding rounds in Saudi Arabia.
Malaa | ملاءة
Malaa (ملاءة) is a Riyadh-based fintech that became Saudi Arabia's first licensed open banking product. Its consumer app lets people link all their bank accounts in one place, track spending, and invest in Shariah-compliant, professionally managed portfolios at what it says is the lowest management fee in the Kingdom. Founded in 2020-2021 by Ali Alorainy and Faisal Alqarni, Malaa is regulated by both the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA) and the Capital Market Authority (CMA), and raised a $17.3M Series A in 2024 led by SNB Capital.
Master Works
Master Works is a Riyadh-based Saudi technology company that helps public- and private-sector organizations turn data into assets. Founded in 2010, it delivers data management, business intelligence, artificial intelligence, computer vision, cloud and digital-transformation services alongside home-grown software products such as the P+ project-management platform and the Baseer speech-analytics engine. With around 700 employees and offices across the Gulf, Egypt, Jordan and India, it serves more than 140 clients and is positioned as a national data champion for Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030.
Mnzil | منزل
Mnzil is a Riyadh-based proptech company that provides integrated housing, transportation, and catering solutions for Saudi Arabia's blue-collar and migrant workforce. Through a hybrid model of subleasing, purpose-built development, and a C2B marketplace, Mnzil lets companies outsource the housing and movement of their workers, offering furnished, regulated, and serviced accommodation at scale. Founded in 2024, it operates 60+ facilities across 13+ cities, serves 100+ corporate clients including Amazon, Nestlé, and SIXT, and raised an $11.7M Series A led by Founders Fund in November 2025.
Mozn
Mozn is a Riyadh-based enterprise AI company founded in 2017 that builds AI for high-stakes decisions in the Arabic-speaking world. Its flagship platform, FOCAL, unifies fraud prevention and anti-money-laundering (AML) compliance for banks, fintechs and governments, while its OSOS platform delivers Arabic natural-language understanding and enterprise knowledge intelligence. Backed by a $10M Series A, Mozn has served more than 100 organizations and, in 2025, became one of only ten vendors worldwide named a Category Leader by Chartis Research in both AML transaction monitoring and KYC solutions.
Munjz | FM & PM Technology
Munjz is a Riyadh-based proptech company that builds cloud-native facility- and property-management software for the Saudi market. Founded in 2017 as a consumer maintenance marketplace, it pivoted to B2B SaaS in late 2021 and now runs Munjz Connect, an Arabic-first CAFM and PMS platform that unifies work orders, assets, vendors, tenants, and finances for property operators, government bodies, and chains such as McDonald's, Dunkin', and DHL. The company raised a $5 million Series A in 2023 led by regional proptech and real-estate investors.