Riyadh just climbed 60 places in three years to become the 23rd-ranked emerging startup ecosystem in the world. Sixty places. I have watched this city transform from my studio window, and even I did not expect the numbers to move this fast.
The Numbers Behind the Noise
Saudi Arabia now has more than 2,500 startups, four unicorns — Tamara, Tabby, STC Pay, Foodics — and startups here raised $1.72 billion across 257 deals last year, a 145% jump year on year. When I started MLO Technologies, pitching a tech venture in Riyadh meant explaining why you were not doing it in Dubai. Nobody asks me that anymore.
And it is not just fintech. The Public Investment Fund launched Humain, a state-backed AI company building Arabic multimodal AI models and serious compute infrastructure. Arabic-first software is finally being treated as the massive opportunity it always was — something I have believed since the day I recorded my first Arabic voiceover session.
What This Means If You Are Building Here
Running MLO Technologies, L&O Apparels, and Hdaiacom Perfume has taught me that ecosystems are not built by capital alone. They are built when capital, talent, regulation, and market access line up at the same time. That is exactly what Vision 2030 is engineering right now — deliberately, structurally, not accidentally.
The openings I find most exciting are the quiet ones: logistics, compliance tools, industrial software, and Arabic-first everything. The obvious sectors are crowded. The unglamorous ones are wide open. When I built Hdaiacom, everyone told me e-commerce perfume was saturated. They were looking at the market. I was looking at the gap inside it.
My Honest Advice
If you are a founder watching Riyadh from the outside, stop watching. The 97% yearly startup growth rate will not wait for your five-year plan. Come, register, build. If you are already here, stop copying Silicon Valley playbooks and start solving Saudi problems in a Saudi way. That is what the next unicorn will look like — and I would bet one of my companies on it.
I have built businesses through the era when this ecosystem barely existed. Watching it rank among the world’s best is not just national pride — it is proof that betting on this city early was the smartest business decision I never had to think twice about.
Riyadh did not join the race. It changed the track — and the world is finally running on it.