There's a certain irony in Silicon Valley venture capital finally planting its flag in the Gulf. For years, the region's startup ecosystem buzzed along—well-funded by regional players, attracting talent, scaling fintech infrastructure—while marquee Sand Hill Road firms mostly watched from afar. That changed this week.
Stitch, a Riyadh-based banking infrastructure startup, announced a $25 million Series A on May 14, led by Andreessen Horowitz. It's the firm's first disclosed investment in the Gulf Cooperation Council, a milestone that arrives later than some observers might have expected given the pace of fintech growth across the region. Perhaps the timing says as much about a16z's evolving global strategy as it does about Stitch's momentum.
The round brings Stitch's total raised to $35 million as of May 2026, following a $10 million seed in May 2025. Returning backers Arbor Ventures, COTU Ventures, Raed Ventures, and Saudi Venture Capital Company all participated again. Latham & Watkins and Walkers handled the legal work.
Why Now?
For a firm managing north of $90 billion, a $25 million check is hardly a bet-the-house moment. But symbolism matters in venture capital. "We're excited to support them, and honored to make this our first investment in the region," said Alex Rampell, the a16z general partner who led the deal.
The language is careful—"honored" suggests deference to a market Andreessen Horowitz is entering as a newcomer, not a conqueror.
What they're walking into: a fintech landscape that, according to reports, has seen significant growth. Reports from 2025 point to more than 300 active fintech companies operating in Saudi Arabia alone. That density reflects the kingdom's push to diversify its economy, but it also signals something venture firms care about more—proven product-market fit and a regulatory environment that has, for the most part, kept pace with innovation.
The Pitch: Fix the Pipes First
Mohamed Oueida, Stitch's CEO, founded the company in 2022 with what amounts to a contrarian thesis. While much of the fintech world chases consumer apps or dabbles in AI-powered features, Stitch sells itself as infrastructure—the unglamorous plumbing beneath the shiny stuff.
"AI on top of broken infrastructure is a dead end," Oueida said in a statement accompanying the funding news. It's a pointed jab at competitors layering machine learning onto creaky legacy cores.
Stitch describes its platform as an "AI-native operating system for modern financial institutions," a phrase that manages to invoke both cutting-edge tech and enterprise reliability. In practice, that means a cloud-native stack handling lending, cards, payments, deposits, ledgers, and applications. According to company-provided information, the modular design enables selective component adoption: banks can adopt pieces without the existential risk of ripping out their entire core infrastructure in one go.
That's a meaningful distinction. Core banking replacements are often complex and can entail significant costs and risks—expensive, multi-year projects with failure rates high enough to make CFOs flinch. Stitch's approach lets institutions modernize incrementally, which in banking terms is about as radical as you can get without triggering an outright revolt from operations teams.
The Numbers, With Caveats
Stitch reports processing over $5 billion in transactions during the six months leading up to the Series A announcement. The company also claims 10x customer growth and 20x revenue growth in 2025. No independent audit has verified these company-provided figures, a standard caveat in early-stage venture reporting but worth noting nonetheless.
Geography-wise, Stitch operates across the GCC, parts of Africa (Egypt and Kenya among them), and Southeast Asia. Its customer roster includes names like Raya Financing, LuLu Exchange, Noqodi, and Foodics. In March, LuLu Exchange launched multi-currency cards built on Stitch's rails. Raya Financing, a SAMA-licensed Saudi auto financing firm, used the platform to digitize auto leasing, personal finance, and SME lending—verticals where legacy systems often still dominate.
The company's LinkedIn profile lists between 201 and 500 employees as of late June 2026, a fairly wide band that suggests either rapid hiring or some ambiguity about how contractors and full-timers are counted. Either way, it's a meaningful headcount for a four-year-old startup.
Backers With Relevant Scar Tissue
The seed round a year prior brought in some strategically useful angels. Jason Gardner, who founded Marqeta and took it public, knows a thing or two about scaling payment infrastructure. Abdulmalik AlSheikh helped establish Saudi payment networks mada and Sadad—the kind of local expertise that matters when navigating regulatory nuance.
Those early backers doubled down in the Series A, which generally signals confidence that the initial thesis is playing out. Or at least that it hasn't fallen apart yet.
A Tailwind Called Modernization
Stitch's timing intersects with a broader infrastructure refresh happening across the Gulf. First Abu Dhabi Bank announced deployments of Temenos core banking and payment systems in Saudi Arabia in May 2026, underscoring the appetite among established institutions for cloud-native platforms. When regional banking giants move, startups selling picks and shovels tend to benefit.
Then there's the cash-to-digital shift. Electronic payments made up 85% of retail transactions in Saudi Arabia in 2025, up from 79% in 2024, according to the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA). A sustained, six-percentage-point annual climb in digital adoption creates downstream demand for exactly the kind of ledger, payment switch, and compliance layers Stitch provides.
It's not a winner-take-all market, though. Stitch competes with established players like Temenos, Mambu, Thought Machine, and 10x—all of which have been active in recent regional deployments. Some are older, better-capitalized, and come with extensive customer references. Whether Stitch can carve out durable differentiation or gets squeezed between entrenched vendors and newer challengers remains an open question.
What Comes Next
The new capital will fund the expected mix: product development, deeper GCC penetration, broader expansion across the Middle East and North Africa, and a global go-to-market push. That last part is worth watching. Selling banking infrastructure globally from a Riyadh base would represent a meaningful shift in the usual direction of enterprise software flows.
Stitch's team, according to press materials, includes operators who've worked at India's National Payments Corporation, FIS, Barclays, Santander, and Azentio. It's the kind of résumé collage you'd want if building multi-market, multi-currency infrastructure: people who've seen regulatory frameworks up close and know how payments actually settle when things go sideways.
For Andreessen Horowitz, the Stitch bet is as much about market access as it is about one company's trajectory. First investments in new geographies carry outsize importance—they signal intent, open doors, and set the tone for what comes after. Whether the Gulf becomes a sustained focus for the firm or remains an opportunistic side bet will depend, in part, on how this first chapter unfolds.
