Saad Ahmed
Honours
In their own words
“I’m building Local because payments in the GCC are slower than they should be.”
The story
Saad Ahmed has spent his career on one problem: how money moves between businesses and the people they serve. Raised in Bahrain, he studied business, management and marketing at the New York Institute of Technology, then worked at Red Bull and FP7 McCann before leading projects across MENA at PwC. He left to found Retroban Middle East, growing it from 10 people to more than 40, and then RBW Fintech Services, where he built BWallet, Bahrain's first peer-to-peer digital wallet, working with regulators, banks, telecom operators and merchants. BWallet became the largest P2P digital wallet in Bahrain and Oman, signing more than 6,000 merchants and serving 100,000 customers in four years before he exited. Along the way he founded LocalBH Media Group (LocalBH, LocalRYDH, LocalDubai and more), a digital media network now reaching tens of millions of people a month across eight cities in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Local brings it all together. In restaurants, hotels and hospitals, paying is never a single moment. It is a chain of checkpoints: waiting for the bill, waiting for a card machine, queueing at a cashier, splitting, tipping, reconciling. Each one costs the customer time and the business revenue. Local collapses that chain into one flow on the customer's own phone: scan, see what you owe, pay in seconds, with no app, no terminal and no queue. Because it plugs straight into the systems merchants already run, Local sits at the centre of the business rather than at its edge, opening the door to lending, loyalty and customer data that a card machine never could.
Launched in June 2025, Local signed more than 250 merchants in its first year and operates across the UAE and Bahrain, with Saudi Arabia launching next. Merchants see higher order values, and staff take home more in tips because Local charges no fees on them. It started in restaurants, where the pain is most visible, and has already built a working prototype for hospital queues, billing and patient flow. Local has raised close to USD 3M at seed from 500 Global Sanabil, 21VC and VentureSouq.
