Iran’s Hidden Unicorns: The Tech Giants the Global Market Has Never Priced
Careem was acquired for $3.1 billion. Tabby was valued at $3.3 billion. Souq sold to Amazon for $580 million.
Inside Iran, companies offering many of the same services have grown to comparable, and in some cases larger, operating scale. But unlike their counterparts elsewhere in the Middle East, they have never had a major global investment or acquisition put a public price on them.
Iran’s roughly 92 million people shop on Digikala, hail rides through Snapp, buy on credit with DigiPay and sell used goods on Divar.
Put their numbers beside their better-known regional counterparts, and the scale of Iran’s largely self-contained tech economy becomes much clearer.
Snapp has 90 million accounts. Careem had 33 million users.
When Uber agreed to acquire Careem for $3.1 billion in 2019, the Dubai-based company had built one of the Middle East’s biggest technology businesses.
Careem reported 33 million users and one million registered drivers across roughly 120 cities in 15 countries.
Iran’s closest equivalent is Snapp.
In 2024–25, Snapp reported 90.3 million registered passenger accounts and 8.6 million registered driver accounts. Its drivers completed 1.5 billion rides across 424 cities, and the company estimates that it controls roughly 90% of Iran’s ride-hailing market.
The figures are not perfectly comparable. Careem reported users rather than registered accounts and did not publish an annual rides figure. But they show the size a ride-hailing platform has reached entirely within Iran.
Digikala lists seven times as many products as Souq did
Souq became one of the defining e-commerce companies of the early Middle Eastern internet.
By the time Amazon acquired it for $580 million in 2017, the marketplace listed roughly two million products.
Digikala, Iran’s major e-commerce platform, now lists 14.5 million.
The company reports 40–45 million monthly active users and annual merchandise sales of roughly $1.2–1.3 billion. Its group generated $491 million in revenue in 2024–25.
That makes Digikala one of the clearest examples of how large an Iranian consumer platform can become without expanding internationally.
DigiPay has as many customers as Tabby has registered users
Buy Now, Pay Later has produced one of MENA’s most valuable fintech companies.
Tabby reached a $3.3 billion valuation in February 2025. It reported 15 million registered users and more than $10 billion in annualized transaction volume.
Iran has its own major player in the category.
DigiPay reports 15 million customers, including nine million using its credit products. In the fourth quarter of 2024 alone, it processed $887 million, while usage of its Buy Now, Pay Later product grew by more than 290% year on year.
The headline comparison is unusually close: both platforms report a user or customer base of 15 million.
Only one has a publicly disclosed multibillion-dollar valuation.
Divar operates at a scale comparable to the region’s biggest classifieds business
The same pattern appears in online classifieds.
dubizzle Group, which operates marketplaces including dubizzle and Bayut, announced plans for a Dubai IPO at a reported price range implying a valuation of roughly $1.8–2.2 billion, before postponing the listing.
The group reported 18 million monthly active users and roughly 54 million monthly sessions.
Iran’s Divar measures its business differently, so a direct user-for-user comparison would be misleading. But its activity numbers show the reach of the platform.
Across nine months of 2024, 62 million unique devices accessed Divar, 18 million users posted an ad and 94 million ads were published.
Again, the Iranian platform reached that scale within a single national market.
The missing number is the valuation
Careem, Souq and Tabby have collectively received public valuations or acquisition prices totaling almost $7 billion. dubizzle’s planned IPO would have added another roughly $2 billion at its reported range.
There is no equivalent number for Snapp, Digikala, DigiPay or Divar.
That does not mean those Iranian companies are worth the same as their regional counterparts. User counts, transaction volumes and market share cannot be converted cleanly into valuations, and companies with similar operating metrics can command very different prices.
What the figures do show is scale.
Iran has built a parallel consumer-tech ecosystem serving tens of millions of people, with homegrown companies occupying many of the same categories that produced some of the Middle East’s best-known tech businesses.
The regional companies have had acquisitions, funding rounds and planned public listings that gave the market a visible price for them.
For Iran’s biggest tech companies, that number remains missing.
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