Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
A startup studio in Riyadh. Whole industries are being assembled here in public, with the seams still showing, and we build small, exact software for the gaps that leaves. The vantage point is local. The problems are not.
The argument
For sixty years, building software meant converting a job into rules a machine could follow: the steps, the exceptions, the order things happen in. Some industries could supply that. Banking wrote itself down. So did air travel, retail and payroll.
Most did not. A venue manager knows which Tuesdays fill and which don’t, and could not explain why in terms a database would accept. A site foreman resequences a week of work in his head after one phone call. A dispatcher holds forty variables and a personal history with every driver. That knowledge is real, load-bearing and unwritten — and it was never a failure of documentation. The work is too situational to specify in advance, and for industries that size, nobody was going to fund the attempt.
So software went where the writing was already done, and left everyone else to spreadsheets. In this country that is most of the economy: 1.7 million active commercial registrations, and small and mid-sized firms employing more than eight million people.
That constraint is gone. A system that learns from how work is actually performed no longer needs the rules supplied up front. And when software does the work rather than merely recording it, what it can be paid for stops being a seat and starts being the labour it saves — which means markets that were too small at software prices are viable at labour prices.
This is not one opportunity. It is several hundred small ones, unevenly distributed and unevenly visible. We build against the ones we can see clearly.
Active commercial registrations in Saudi Arabia at the end of the third quarter of 2025. Small and mid-sized businesses employ more than 8.4 million people here.
Monsha’at · Ministry of Commerce
The status quo
It arrives in three forms, and they make the same mistake.
01
The first is generic software bought from somewhere else. A product designed around another market’s assumptions, then configured until it half-fits. Everyone using it has quietly agreed to work slightly wrong.
02
The second is the general-purpose assistant, pointed at an industry it has never seen, sold on the premise that the specifics don’t matter much.
03
The third is software that is simply too heavy to be reachable. Priced, scoped and installed for organisations with procurement departments and implementation budgets. We have no argument with it — it solved a real problem well for the companies that could afford to have it solved. Our point is narrower: it was never on offer to a forty-person firm, and everyone involved knew that.
So we aren’t competing for those customers, and we don’t build anything that asks a business to move off a system it already runs. We build in the space the large vendors will never enter — too small, too specific, too particular to be worth the trip. That space isn’t what’s left over. It is exactly the space the economics just opened, which is the whole argument of this page.
What all three share is a tolerance for the particulars of an industry as background noise.
The particulars are the business. They are the only thing that is hard to copy, and the only reason anyone changes what they use.
Who we build for
Close to the work — nobody has to askFar from the work
Our buyers look unrelated. A contractor with nine crews. A team of six inside a large company who bought something on a card without telling anyone. A person deciding where to go on Thursday night.
They have one thing in common, and it is the thing that matters: nobody has to ask. No procurement cycle, no steering committee, no three-year commitment, no implementation partner. The person who feels the problem is allowed to fix it.
That changes what can be built. Software bought this way has to prove itself in an afternoon, not a quarter. It cannot assume an IT department, because there isn’t one. It has to be worth paying for before anyone has been trained on it, and it has to work alongside whatever is already there.
Those are hard constraints. They are the reason the large vendors don’t come here. They are also the reason a small company can take a market outright.
Where we build
01
Lifestyle, events, hospitality, culture, live entertainment. How people find out what’s happening, decide, book, arrive, and remember it afterwards.
This is the fastest-moving consumer category in our region and among the least well served by software built for it. Saudi Arabia’s travel and tourism sector contributed SAR 668 billion to GDP in 2025 and grew 7.4 percent — close to double the global rate. The entertainment sector alone recorded more than 89 million visits across 1,690 events, from 975 active destinations, up from 513 the year before.
Almost none of it runs on software designed for the job. Venues use booking tools built for restaurants in another country. Organisers run million-riyal events out of group chats. Demand here was constructed at national scale inside a decade. The operating layer underneath it was not.
02
Logistics, construction, field services, real estate, professional services — and inside them, specifically, the small and mid-sized firms. A haulier with forty trucks. A contractor running nine crews. A property manager with two hundred units and one overloaded coordinator. Businesses large enough to have a real coordination problem and far too small to have ever been sold a solution to it.
They weren’t skipped because their problems were hard. They were skipped because the arithmetic never worked. Ten thousand businesses paying four thousand riyals a month is a rounding error to an investor and a decade of work to a founder — so the founder went elsewhere, every time, for thirty years. The large vendors were scoped for organisations a hundred times the size, and never looked down.
The arithmetic has changed, and recently enough that most of these markets are still open. The first credible product in a category like this doesn’t face a competitor. It faces a spreadsheet, somebody who has made peace with it, and a short window before anyone else notices.
Saudi travel and tourism contribution to GDP in 2025, growing 7.4% — against a global sector average of 4.1%.
World Travel & Tourism Council · converted at the fixed rate of SAR 3.75
Active licensed entertainment destinations in 2025, up from 513 the previous year.
Saudi General Entertainment Authority
The connection
In both, the work is physical, situational, and held in people’s heads. In both, the software that exists was built for somebody else. And in both, demand is now moving faster than the machinery underneath it — a country that assembled a live entertainment industry in under a decade has the same structural problem as a contractor whose clients now expect the tracking a parcel company gives them.
The buyer is the same person too, in the only sense that counts. A venue manager choosing a booking tool and a consumer choosing where to spend Thursday night are making the same kind of decision: fast, personal, reversible, made alone.
And the skill either one requires is identical. It is not model engineering. It is going into a trade and learning how the work is genuinely done — not how it is written in a process document, and not how a consultant would draw it on a whiteboard. Then encoding that faithfully, including the parts that look like inefficiency until you understand they were judgment.
That skill transfers between industries. Sector expertise does not, and we don’t claim it. What we have is a repeatable way of acquiring it.
Method
Before anything is designed, we spend real time where the job happens. The first thing we produce is never a product spec. It is an honest account of how the work is done today, including everything people work around.
A product that does one thing precisely right for one kind of operator beats a platform that does forty things adequately. That is true generally, and it is not optional for a buyer with no IT department to make up the difference. We don’t build suites, systems of record, or anything that requires a business to move off something it already runs.
Narrow describes the product, not the ambition. A tool that does one thing exactly right still needs a market that can be reached without a sales army, a price that holds, a reason it stays hard to copy, and someone who owns it. All four get tested before we commit, and we abandon considerably more than we start. The discipline is keeping the product small while the business is not.
Product, engineering, design and the parts of company-building that are the same every time are held centrally. That is the point of the arrangement: each venture should start further along than the last, because the second time you do something is faster than the first. The compounding is the entire reason to run a studio instead of a fund.
Every company gets an owner with real equity and real authority. A studio that keeps control of everything it makes is a product team with extra steps.
Riyadh
We opened by claiming some gaps are only visible from here. This is what that means in practice.
A market building whole consumer sectors from close to zero, in compressed time, makes gaps unusually legible. Categories that took forty years to settle elsewhere are being assembled here now, in public and at speed. You can watch an industry decide how it works — which conventions stick, which workarounds harden into permanent process, where the software should have been and never arrived.
Seventy-one percent of the population is under thirty-five and the median age is 23.5. New products get adopted quickly enough that a question which would take three years to answer in a mature market gets answered here in one.
And the imported software does not fit. That is an inconvenience for operators and an advantage for anyone paying attention.
None of which makes the problems local. An events operator in Riyadh and one in Lisbon are running the same broken process — the second has simply had longer to get used to it.
We build here because this is where the decisions are still being made in the open. What gets built travels.
Share of the Saudi population under 35. Median age: 23.5.
Saudi General Authority for Statistics, Family Statistics Report 2024
A note
No logos, no case studies, no product names. The reason is simpler than the usual one: nothing we have built has launched yet.
Several things have been built, across different domains. None of them is public. We don’t put unlaunched work on a website — a site that lists what hasn’t shipped is a site making promises, and this one makes an argument instead.
The work gets shown in a conversation, to people with a reason to see it.