FWDstart

For Tewfik Cassis, Lean Technologies is not an open banking company, or at least not only that. It’s trying to become the AWS for fintech in the Middle East, an infrastructure layer so reliable, ubiquitous and necessary that payments, verified financial data, underwriting and money movement can be built on top of it without merchants stitching together five or six providers. That ambition now stre...

In this episode, we sit down with Mohammad Al-Khalili, co-founder of ClearGrid, the AI debt-resolution company quietly rebuilding one of the least glamorous, most avoided corners of finance.  ClearGrid came out of stealth in 2025 with $10 million across pre-seed and seed rounds, co-led by RAED Ventures, BECO Capital and Nuwa Capital, with Aramco's Waed Ventures, KBW Ventures and a string of marque...

In this episode, we sit down with Sanjar Samiev and Denis Gavrilin, co-founders of Comfi, the B2B buy-now-pay-later platform that recently raised a $65 million pre-Series A to finance the invoices the rest of the market would rather ignore. Sanjar arrived in the UAE back in 2006, built a last-mile delivery business that exited to Amazon, then ran a manufacturing company, which is where he came fac...

In this episode, we sit down with Deepali Nangia and Rana Abdel Latif, the partners leading Speedinvest's first dedicated Middle East and Africa fund, a flagship vehicle for the Vienna-based firm that's been quietly investing across emerging markets since 2013. Earlier this week, Speedinvest announced the fund with anchor commitments from Mubadala (through its MENA Venture Capital Fund), the Qatar...

In this episode, we sit down with Mahdi Yahya, the founder of Ori, which has just been acquired by Brookfield Asset Management and merged into Radiant, a vertically integrated AI infrastructure company combining power, capital, compute, and software into a single proposition. Mahdi fled Lebanon during the 2006 war at 19, took a taxi to Damascus, flew to London with no degree, and has spent the las...

In this episode, we sit down with Alex Epure, co-founder and CEO of Qureos, an AI-powered hiring platform that's just raised a $5M seed round led by Prosus. Alex spent nine years at Cisco, moved to Dubai, and then went from managing global enterprise accounts to launching Saudi Arabia for Swvl during COVID. What started as a passion project helping university graduates land their first job has sin...

In this episode, we sit down with Glenn Harwood, co-founder of AlgoDriven, who has just completed an all-cash exit to Emergence Software, a San Francisco-based hold-forever software company. Glenn started selling cars at Mercedes-Benz in Australia at 20, became a top-15 salesperson nationally, moved to Al Ain and then Dubai, and eventually turned a frustration with how dealerships valued used cars...

In this episode, we sit down with Hassan Fayed, founder of Aydi, the company behind Orth, an AI agronomist now live in almost 200 countries just a few months after launch. Hasan grew up working his family's farm in Egypt, moved to Dubai, and then packed his bags during COVID to come back and tackle one of agriculture's most stubborn problems: the billion-strong workforce that's been almost entirel...

In this episode, we sit down with Fouad Jeryes, co-founder and Chief Business Officer at Maqsam, MENA's AI-powered cloud communications platform. Fouad has been building in the region for over a decade, from co-founding CashBasha (one of Jordan's most trafficked e-commerce sites before its acquisition) to helping launch Oasis 500, Jordan's first tech accelerator, to running Amman Tech Tuesdays for...

Today's guest is Talal Hasan, a lawyer turned venture capitalist turned climate tech founder who has spent the better part of a decade chasing a rather ambitious goal: turning carbon dioxide into rock. His journey started in the Omani investment world, helping set up the venture capital arm for the Sultanate's sovereign wealth fund, but a 2018 discovery about a massive dead zone in the Arabian Sea...

Today's guest is Djamel Mohand, a Rocket Internet alumnus who landed in Saudi Arabia over a decade ago, back when relocating to the Kingdom for tech was rather less fashionable than it is today. What was supposed to be a six-month stint turned into ten years of building businesses across the region, most notably as COO at Foodics, where he helped scale the restaurant management platform to over 30...

Alina Truhina is a Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Utopia Capital Management, a platform spanning VC funds and a venture studio investing across emerging markets. The firm operates Atypical Ventures, a Middle East-plus fund covering Turkey and Pakistan, Radical Fund focused on climate in Southeast Asia, and the recently launched UTOPIA Studio – an AI-native company builder that both creates new...

Rami Tabbara is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Stake, a digital real estate investment platform that democratizes access to property markets in Dubai, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. Allowing users to invest fractionally from as little as 500 dirhams, Stake has grown into a fintech powerhouse with over 2 million downloads, users in 170 countries, and nearly 1.4 billion dirhams transacted on the...

Nafez Dakkak is the Founding Partner of Anara Capital, a $50 million impact fund investing in early-stage startups across learning, climate, and wellbeing in the MENA region. Designed to be intentional and scalable, the fund backs founders solving critical infrastructure challenges across the Levant, GCC and North Africa. Before launching Anara, Nafez was the Founding CEO of the Queen Rania Founda...

Nour Al Hassan is the Founder and CEO of Tarjama& and Arabic AI, a UAE-based AI company building Arabic-first language models, enterprise agents, and document intelligence systems for governments and large organisations. Before Arabic AI, Nour spent more than 16 years building Tarjama& from a bootstrapped translation business into a profitable, technology-led platform serving global enterp...

Arya Bolurfrushan is the Founder and CEO of Applied AI, the company behind Opus, a platform enabling enterprises to design AI-native workflows. The company raised a $42 million seed round in November 2022, days before ChatGPT launched, and earlier this year closed a $55 million Series A led by G42, with Palantir and Bessemer also participating. Before founding Applied AI, Arya developed his convic...

Ibrahim Manna is the Founder and CEO of BRKZ, a Saudi construction tech startup built to address inefficiencies in construction procurement: fragmented supply chains, manual processes, and cash flow gaps faced by contractors and factories. Before founding BRKZ, Ibrahim spent eight years at Careem as one of the core architects of its expansion, launching 11 out of 15 markets ahead of the company's...

Mark Kahn is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Omnivore, India’s leading agritech and climate-tech venture capital firm with more than $300 million under management. Backing over 45 startups transforming food, agriculture, and sustainability, Omnivore has played a defining role in shaping India’s agritech ecosystem and the country’s emerging climate investment landscape. He joins the podcast...