The Garage traded parking spaces for startup runway

A parking garage is an unlikely place to go looking for a new business model. In Riyadh, somebody took the name literally. The Garage occupies a former multi-storey car park on the campus of King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, where the new traffic consists of founders, mentors and investors. The ramps survived. So did much of the concrete. The building’s assignment changed.

That physical transformation makes a good photograph. The more consequential experiment happens inside: can a single destination make the scattered work of starting a technology company easier? The Garage combines incubation, acceleration, offices, training and introductions. Its offer addresses a familiar founder problem: having a promising product while lacking the contacts, technical help or market knowledge needed to turn it into a business.

A car park with a second career

The headquarters opened in September 2023, but the project had been announced at LEAP in February 2022 and had begun supporting startups that April. The community therefore preceded its completed home. By opening day, programs associated with The Garage had already graduated more than 230 startups involving 450 founders from over 50 countries.

STUFISH, the architecture practice behind the conversion, retained much of the parking structure. Existing kerbs helped establish the interior layout. Modular partitions and movable furniture allowed offices to change with their occupants. In the central atrium, a pair of spiral staircases encourages people to circulate between spaces. This is architecture with a practical problem to solve: a startup’s headcount rarely respects the original floor plan.

Other details are cheerfully less corporate. Launch coverage described a quiet nap zone; the interior mixes exposed structure with graffiti and transport-inspired signage. The building does not ask visitors to forget its previous occupation. Keeping those traces gives the campus a recognizable character while making an existing asset useful again.

A research campus is part of the offer

The Garage emerged from a partnership between Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, KACST and the Saudi Federation for Cybersecurity, Programming and Drones. That institutional origin explains its place in the market: a publicly backed destination for technology businesses, with facilities and programs intended to help them establish and expand operations.

KACST supplies a particularly relevant connection. The original announcement promised access to laboratories, rapid prototyping facilities and specialist capabilities. For a team developing a physical product, the practical question is whether it can test something. The campus connection puts that question alongside the usual accelerator concerns about presentations, customers and investment.

The range is broad. A U.S. Commercial Service briefing identified software-as-a-service, fintech, logistics, e-commerce, entertainment, tourism, robotics and 3D printing among the targeted fields. The Garage’s expertise lies in organizing support across those businesses. It brings technical resources, program operators and professional networks together; the founders supply the particular product and industry knowledge.

“Station F (the Paris-based startup incubator) was cited as one of the inspirations”

Omar Al-Shabaan, then CEO, in LEAP Forward, March 2024

The Paris comparison is useful. A startup campus can become a destination in its own right, making introductions less dependent on a founder’s existing address book. The Garage adds the Saudi research-campus setting and government relationships to that idea. For an international company considering the kingdom, those local connections are a meaningful part of the proposition.

An idea, a sale, or a stalled engine

The current program menu makes a sensible distinction between three starting points. The Incubator accepts early ideas and develops them toward an initial product, a business model and a first market test. The Accelerator works with existing companies already generating sales, addressing the obstacles to further expansion.

The third track, The Bridge, is especially revealing. It is intended for projects that have launched but stopped growing. Its description focuses on diagnosing the difficulty and rebuilding the business model toward stability. A business can be real, operating and still stuck. Giving that condition a dedicated program makes room for something less glamorous than launch day: working out why progress stopped.

The listed benefits include offices, workshops, mentors, investor access and laboratory access. Saudi Arabia’s Research, Development and Innovation Authority describes the incubator’s purpose in similarly concrete terms: helping entrepreneurs build prototypes and validate ideas. Its description of the accelerator emphasizes market entry and expansion for local, regional and international technology companies.

For a prospective applicant, the useful move is to identify the next unresolved business question before choosing a track. Does anyone want the product? Can the company sell it repeatedly? Has demand stalled? Those questions call for different work. A program label becomes helpful when it points toward that work.

The desk is free. Read the investment terms.

The Garage’s website says facilities and workspaces are provided without fees to companies affiliated with its programs. The U.S. Commercial Service also described participation as free in its January 2024 briefing. That support can reduce a founder’s operating burden, particularly when shared facilities replace an office the company would otherwise need to arrange itself.

But a campus hosts different organizations, and their agreements deserve separate attention. Antler, one of the hosted programs linked from The Garage’s website, currently describes a ten-week regional residency and an investment process for selected teams. Its published initial offer is $180,000 through a SAFE agreement for 11 percent equity, with potential additional follow-on funding. Those are Antler’s terms, rather than a universal Garage offer.

The distinction is practical. Workspace, admission to a program and an investment decision are different transactions. Founders should also budget for the work around participation: their time, team expenses and any travel or relocation. A supported office helps with one cost. It cannot pay every bill associated with building a company.

The early Google for Startups partnership illustrates another part of the model. Announced in August 2022, it aimed to run four accelerator cohorts annually and support 100 technology startups. That was a program target. The underlying mechanism was access to experience and networks that a new hub would otherwise have to assemble on its own.

A concrete example is EmFlex, an auto-financing startup. An EmFlex recruitment listing on Antler’s job board described the company as incubating at The Garage and backed by Antler. It illustrates the division of roles: a young business uses the campus while a separate investor supplies backing.

The people need an upgrade, too

In March 2025, The Garage added an academy with Tuwaiq Academy. Its announced focus included emerging technologies, product management and technical capacity building, aimed at supported startups and technology project managers in small and medium-sized businesses. The addition widened the service from helping companies find resources to helping their people use them.

The launch named collaborations with organizations and universities including NVIDIA, Google Cloud, Meta and INSEAD. The relevant promise is professional development tied to the work of running technology projects. A founder may need investor introductions; the person managing the product may need a different set of skills altogether.

Community programming supplies another route in. Garage Disrupt brings entrepreneurs and investors together, while specialist sessions address narrower problems. One publicly listed workshop, led by amplifAI health CEO Dr. Meshari Alwashmi, invited participants to explore commercializing intellectual property using examples from their own work. That is a useful test of an event’s value: whether a participant leaves better able to do something specific.

Read the numbers on their own terms

The Garage’s website now reports more than 950 startups graduated from its own and hosted programs, alongside more than 7,500 direct and indirect jobs generated by the companies. It also displays a combined startup valuation figure above SAR3.7 billion. These are the hub’s reported measures of activity and economic footprint.

They measure different things. A cumulative graduate count is different from the number of companies occupying the building today. Valuation is different from money raised, and both differ from revenue. The SAR3.7 billion figure concerns the supported startups collectively. It should never be read as The Garage’s own valuation or as cash available to applicants.

Dates and program boundaries matter, too. In February 2026, coverage of the tenth accelerator intake counted more than 200 graduates across nine previous accelerator cohorts. That narrower figure can sit alongside a larger total covering hosted programs. Neither figure by itself establishes how much of a company’s performance the hub caused.

Borrow the sequence, then test the business

The most transferable lesson is to start the useful activity before perfecting the venue. The Garage’s programs were operating before the headquarters opened. Another lesson is to separate company stages: a prototype needs testing, a growing business needs expansion support, and a stalled company needs diagnosis. These are editorial lessons drawn from the structure of the project, rather than a guarantee that copying it will produce the same results.

For founders, participation is most useful when the resources address an actual constraint. Laboratory access matters when testing is the obstacle. Introductions matter when the right buyer or partner is difficult to reach. Neither fixes a product that customers have no reason to purchase. A company with an urgent commercial problem still needs to keep selling while it applies.

There is a concrete reason to plan ahead. In a post about the ninth accelerator intake, Arwa Shafi described more than 470 applications and a filtering process expected to take at least four months. Her advice was basic and useful: watch the application email, respond promptly and keep the application updated. Access requires work before the program begins.

The Garage has given Riyadh’s founders an address where several pieces of company-building can happen together. The building is memorable, and the arrangement is worth studying. The final test takes place beyond its walls, when someone decides the product is useful enough to buy.