Founding MENA #9
Welcome to the Founding MENA newsletter, bringing you the top stories from across the region every week.
Before we get into it, I hope all of our MENA based readers are safe and well. As a resident of the UAE, I share the widely held desire for de-escalation of conflict across the region.
I hope you find the newsletter insightful, but I’m always open to feedback and suggestions. Let’s get into it!
💰 Investment Rounds
- 🇦🇪 TruDoc raised $15M in pre-Series B led by Al Nahyan and Al-Ketbi families. See more here.
- 🇦🇪 Skipr raised $2M in seed at a $10M valuation. See more here.
- 🇲🇦 Weego raised $1.1M led by Azur Innovation Fund. See more here.
- 🇶🇦 iQtech raised an undisclosed amount from Selexi and Uniero. See more here.
- 🇸🇦 Rimal Semiconductors raised an undisclosed bridge round from Keheilan Asset Management. See more here.
- 🇦🇪 Rewa raised an undisclosed amount in seed from Qatar Development Bank and others. See more here.
📰 Startup News
Will MENA investors hit pause on startup funding?
The Iran conflict is freezing venture capital deployment across the Middle East, threatening to stall a startup ecosystem that raised $7.5 billion in 2025, more than triple the year prior.
MENA tech has boomed this decade. Government-backed initiatives in the UAE and Saudi Arabia turned the region into a magnet for founders and capital.
But Iranian strikes across the Gulf hitting Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain changed the calculus overnight.
The pattern is already visible. US investors participated in 144 MENA deals in 2025, second only to Saudi investors at 227 transactions. Replicating that activity in 2026 looks unlikely.
BlackRock, managing $14 trillion in assets, isn’t changing its investment stance despite the escalation. The firm warned against “indiscriminate portfolio de-risking” and said it stands ready to “lean against any market overreactions.”
The real question is duration. BlackRock identified three variables that will determine whether this is a short-term volatility shock or something more persistent: how long hostilities continue, the degree of energy transit disruption, and the political end-state.
For now, founders are waiting. There will be both short- and long-term changes to how founders approach building startups in MENA as a result of this conflict.
Read more here.
🔦 Spotlight
Who is the founder behind the UAE’s first PropTech unicorn?
Michael Lahyani arrived in Dubai in 2005 with no job, no contacts, and a gut feeling that the UAE’s property boom was being built on broken infrastructure.
Lebanese-born, Canadian-raised, Lahyani watched how digital listings transformed British real estate and saw the same opportunity in Dubai, except Dubai’s market was wilder, faster, and completely analog.
Picture Dubai in 2005: Cranes everywhere. New towers announced weekly. Speculators flipping off-plan properties before groundbreaking. And the entire system ran on printed flyers, broker WhatsApp groups, and handshake deals in hotel lobbies.
Lahyani saw chaos. He also saw opportunity.
In 2007, he launched Property Finder from a small office with minimal capital. The pitch was simple: aggregate every listing in the UAE into one searchable database. Make it free for users. Charge brokers for premium placement.
Timing was perfect, until it wasn’t.
The 2008 global financial crisis hit Dubai like a freight train. Property values collapsed. Developers abandoned projects mid-construction. The market Lahyani had just entered essentially disappeared overnight.
Most startups would’ve died. Property Finder went into survival mode.
Lahyani kept the platform running on fumes, maintaining relationships with the brokers who survived the crash. When the market bottomed out and slowly recovered from 2010 onward, Property Finder was still there, battle-tested, leaner, and now dominant by default. Competitors had shut down or pivoted. Lahyani stayed.
By 2015, Property Finder was processing millions of searches monthly and had expanded beyond Dubai into Abu Dhabi, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. The model worked: buyers and renters got centralised search, brokers got qualified leads, developers got distribution.
But Lahyani bootstrapped for over a decade. No venture capital. No growth-at-all-costs mentality. Just profitability, slow geographic expansion, and SEO dominance.
That changed in 2018 when General Atlantic invested at a $100M+ valuation, Property Finder’s first institutional round after 11 years. The capital funded aggressive hiring, tech upgrades, and regional M&A.
In 2022, Property Finder acquired Zingat, Turkey’s leading property portal, giving it a foothold in an 85-million-person market. The move signaled ambition beyond the GCC.
Property Finder controls the digital gateway to MENA real estate. It powers 20+ million monthly searches, connects 1.5 million buyers with 25,000 agents, and generates 500,000 qualified leads monthly.
The platform has become the infrastructure layer for how property gets discovered and transacted across the Middle East.
Lahyani survived the 2008 crash when everyone else quit. He bootstrapped for 11 years when everyone else raised early. He built slowly when everyone else scaled recklessly.
Eighteen years later, Property Finder is the last one standing.
📰 Other News
AWS outage exposes dependence on critical infrastructure
An Amazon Web Services data centre in the UAE was struck by ‘objects’ during regional conflict on March 1, causing fires and widespread service disruptions.
AWS confirmed two UAE facilities and one Bahrain facility were damaged. Abu Dhabi investment platform Sarwa went offline. Payments companies Alaan and Hubpay reported critical outages. Careem experienced disruptions. Major banks including ADCB and Emirates NBD flagged service problems.
Most UAE and GCC-based startups run their entire infrastructure on AWS’s ME-CENTRAL-1 region. When two of three availability zones went offline simultaneously, there was nowhere to fail over.
For startups, multi-region architecture dramatically increases costs, making it prohibitive for early-stage companies. But single-region deployments can be wiped out by a single incident.
Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Riyadh are competing to become regional AI hubs. Microsoft alone has committed $15.2 billion to UAE data centers. But as the Middle East consolidates its position as a tech hub, it also concentrates risk.
Startups must rethink infrastructure strategies, investing in multi-region failover despite the cost, or risk catastrophic downtime when the next disruption hits.
Read more here.
That’s all for this week, thanks! All of our MENA based readers: please stay safe. Sam
First published 9 Mar 2026 on Substack
The week in MENA tech, every Monday. Free.
Keep pulling this thread
