For many people with limited mobility, getting from one place to another can involve a chain of obstacles most drivers rarely have to consider: finding accessible transportation, transferring out of a wheelchair, relying on another person for assistance, or navigating vehicles that were never designed around their needs.

For Tunisian innovator Khadija Jellouli, those challenges were personal.

A wheelchair user herself, Jellouli had experienced the limitations of conventional transportation firsthand. Instead of approaching accessibility as an engineering problem from a distance, she began with a problem she understood through daily life.

Her answer was ambitious: build an electric vehicle specifically around people with disabilities and limited mobility.

That idea eventually developed inside her HawKar workshop, where Jellouli worked alongside two friends who also use wheelchairs. Together, they moved through research, experimentation and product development until they arrived at a working vehicle designed to make independent mobility easier.

Now, with two versions developed and a vehicle capable of reaching around 45 kilometers per hour, Jellouli is confronting the next challenge: moving from prototypes and limited production toward manufacturing at a larger scale.

Building From a Problem She Knew Personally

Some founders discover problems through market research.

Jellouli lived hers.

As a wheelchair user, she understood how the absence of suitable transportation could restrict independence. A journey that might be routine for another person could require planning, assistance and an accessible vehicle that may not always be available.

That experience became the starting point for HawKar.

Rather than modifying a conventional car after it had already been designed, Jellouli approached the vehicle around the needs of wheelchair users from the beginning.

It was an important distinction.

The objective was not simply to build another small electric car. It was to reconsider how someone with limited mobility enters, controls and uses the vehicle.

Turning the Idea Into a Working Vehicle

Developing that idea required more than Jellouli working alone.

Inside the HawKar workshop, she was joined by two friends who also use wheelchairs, bringing direct user experience into the development process itself.

The team went through research, testing and successive development as it worked toward a practical electric vehicle.

That user-centered approach is visible in one of the car’s most important features.

Instead of requiring the driver to leave the wheelchair before entering the vehicle, the car includes a rear door through which the wheelchair can be brought directly inside.

The vehicle can accommodate two people.

For its intended users, that is more than a design feature.

It addresses one of the fundamental points of friction that Jellouli set out to solve: dependence on others simply to get into a vehicle and travel.

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Rethinking the Driving Experience

Accessibility also shaped the controls.

The vehicle uses a simplified driving system, including a steering wheel equipped with a handle, designed to make controlling the car easier for people with different mobility requirements.

An integrated screen on the dashboard provides information intended to help drivers identify their routes and destinations.

Together, those elements reflect HawKar’s broader approach: instead of asking people with disabilities to adapt themselves to a conventional vehicle, adapt the vehicle to the people who will actually use it.

And because mobility limitations differ from one person to another, Jellouli did not stop with a single configuration.

Developing Two Versions Around Different Needs

Jellouli has developed two versions of the electric vehicle.

One is a standard model.

The second is a more advanced version that can be customized according to the individual needs of its user.

That customization could prove particularly important for an accessibility-focused vehicle. Disability is not a single set of physical requirements, and a control system suitable for one driver may not work equally well for another.

Building adaptability into the product therefore expands the idea beyond simply producing a wheelchair-accessible car.

It points toward a vehicle platform that could potentially be configured around different users.

An Electric Vehicle Built for Everyday Independence

The vehicle can reach a top speed of approximately 45 kilometers per hour.

That positions the current concept less as a conventional high-speed passenger car and more as a compact mobility solution designed around everyday transportation.

And that distinction matters.

The significance of HawKar does not lie in competing with mainstream electric vehicles on horsepower or maximum speed. Its value proposition is accessibility and independence.

For someone who depends on accessible transportation or assistance from another person, the ability to enter a vehicle with a wheelchair and operate it independently could fundamentally change everyday mobility.

Jellouli’s own experience gives that mission a particularly direct connection between founder and product.

She was not imagining what her target users might need.

She was one of them.

From Prototype to Production

The technical development, however, is only one stage of turning HawKar into a viable mobility solution.

The project remains at the prototype and limited-production stage, and Jellouli is now seeking investors and partners capable of helping it move toward larger-scale manufacturing.

That transition may prove just as important as building the original vehicle.

Producing a prototype demonstrates that an idea can work.

Manufacturing vehicles consistently, safely and affordably at scale requires capital, industrial partnerships, supply chains and production capabilities.

For HawKar, therefore, the next chapter depends on finding partners willing to take an accessibility innovation developed in a Tunisian workshop and help transform it into a product available to a much larger population.

Turning Personal Experience Into a Wider Solution

There is a simple idea at the center of Jellouli’s story.

She encountered a problem.

She understood it intimately.

And instead of accepting that the available transportation infrastructure had not been designed for people like her, she began designing an alternative.

Working alongside two other wheelchair users also meant that HawKar’s development was shaped by people experiencing the problem rather than exclusively by engineers attempting to anticipate their needs.

The result is still early.

HawKar has not yet reached mass manufacturing, and securing the investment and industrial support required to get there remains an important challenge.

But Jellouli has already crossed the first difficult boundary between identifying a problem and physically building an answer to it.

What began with the everyday mobility challenges of a wheelchair user has become two versions of an electric vehicle, built around a rear wheelchair entrance, simplified controls and customizable accessibility.

The next challenge is no longer proving that the idea can become a car.

It is finding the partners who can help put that car on the road.

Some entrepreneurs become associated with one company.

Abdallah Abu-Sheikh’s career is harder to reduce to a single name.

Before Mal, there was Astra Tech.

Before Astra Tech, there were Barq and Rizek.

Before technology, there was renewable energy in sub-Saharan Africa.

Across those businesses, Abu-Sheikh moved through industries that appear almost unrelated: power generation, home services, healthcare, electric mobility, communications, payments, and now banking.

Yet the pattern running through them has remained relatively consistent.

Find a problem that has not been adequately solved for the region. Build locally rather than wait for a global company to adapt its product. Scale quickly when demand appears. And, when a business reaches a stage where the challenge becomes repetition rather than invention, move toward the next problem.

That approach has produced an unusually dense entrepreneurial record for someone who said in a 2026 interview that he was only 30.

By then, he had already helped build platforms serving more than 150 million users, raised $500 million for Astra Tech while still in his twenties, completed several acquisitions, exited the company at the height of Botim’s growth, and returned with his largest zero-to-one bet yet.

In January 2026, his Abu Dhabi-based fintech Mal secured $230 million, a round Abu-Sheikh later described as the biggest seed round in MENA’s history.

But the path to that round began more than a decade earlier.

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Becoming an Entrepreneur at 17

Abu-Sheikh was born in Jordan and spent parts of his childhood between the UK, Jordan, China and London, while his family business had significant operations in Beijing.

Entrepreneurship was not initially a career plan.

His father had built a major private charter aviation business, but after his death in 2013, family disputes contributed to the collapse of the company. Abu-Sheikh was still in university.

According to his account, the event abruptly changed his responsibilities. At 17, he became the de facto breadwinner for a household that included his mother and seven younger siblings.

He later described that period without the romanticism often attached to startup origin stories. Building a business, he said, did not begin with a childhood dream of becoming an entrepreneur. It was closer to necessity.

That necessity eventually took him to Africa, where the family’s aviation business had maintained relationships.

A trip intended partly to deal with remaining assets would instead lead to his first company.

Building Lux Development Partners in Africa

A chance conversation introduced Abu-Sheikh to renewable energy.

As he recalled it, the then-president of The Gambia asked whether he could help build a renewable-energy project.

Abu-Sheikh said yes.

He also admitted later that he had little idea at the time how he was going to do it.

The opportunity became the foundation for Lux Development Partners, a renewable-energy and power-development company focused on sub-Saharan Africa.

Launched while Abu-Sheikh was still remarkably young, Lux went on to develop power projects totaling approximately 1.2GW across several African markets, according to his account.

By 2018, larger global players were entering the sector. Abu-Sheikh decided that the competitive environment had changed and exited the business, selling it to Chinese companies operating in the industry.

The exit arrived only a few years after he had been forced into business by family circumstances.

For a moment, he thought he was finished.

He moved to the UAE believing he had made enough money to retire.

He soon discovered that retirement did not suit him.

The desire to build returned, and this time it would take him into technology.

Rizek: Building a Local Home-Services Super App

In 2019, Abu-Sheikh co-founded Rizek, an on-demand marketplace for home services.

The UAE already had companies offering home services, but Abu-Sheikh believed the opportunity was not simply to replicate those platforms. Rizek would compete through localization—building around regional language, behavior, suppliers and market intelligence.

The company launched with around $5 million in investment from backers including Abu Dhabi Investment Office, E-Tech Investments and Rozana Investments.

It later raised another $10 million in Series A funding from Peak Investments, ADQ and regional family offices, with expansion into markets including Saudi Arabia and Egypt in its sights.

Rizek gradually expanded beyond household services.

Then COVID-19 arrived.

Turning a Pandemic Into a Healthcare Expansion

The pandemic created an urgent problem: people needed medical testing and other healthcare services precisely when many were afraid to visit hospitals and clinics.

Rizek reacted quickly.

Abu-Sheikh said the company built and launched an entire healthcare vertical in approximately 24 hours, allowing services including COVID testing to reach customers at home.

In a later podcast, he recalled how primitive the operation looked at first.

The team expected perhaps 10 or 20 orders.

An early customer happened to receive service within minutes, shared the experience with relatives, and suddenly dozens of orders arrived while the company lacked enough nurses, call-center capacity and dispatch systems.

For Abu-Sheikh, that chaos became a lesson in company building: systems do not necessarily emerge fully designed. Often, every new failure reveals a process that must be created.

Rizek kept expanding.

At the height of the healthcare operation, Abu-Sheikh said the platform was facilitating approximately 16,000 to 17,000 tests per day.

The venture had moved from home services into healthcare and demonstrated something that would recur throughout his career: the ability to attach new services to an existing platform when user behavior revealed a larger opportunity.

Barq: Moving From Software Into Electric Mobility

His next venture moved him into another industry again.

Abu-Sheikh co-founded Barq with Ahmed Al Mazroui as a technology-driven electric mobility company focused particularly on MENA’s last-mile delivery sector.

Barq was not conceived simply as an importer of electric vehicles.

The idea was to develop products specifically around regional logistics requirements, including the Rena Lite bicycle, Rena Max scooter and Yas 1 drone.

Abu-Sheikh saw a structural opening.

China and India had enormous internal demand for electric two-wheelers and mobility products, meaning manufacturers there had little incentive to prioritize the Middle East.

The result, in his view, was a regional vacuum.

Barq aimed to fill it by designing mobility technology from the region, for the region, rather than depending entirely on imported solutions.

The company also explored manufacturing facilities in markets including the UAE, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, while keeping engineering and intellectual property inside the region.

By 2022, Abu-Sheikh had already moved from energy infrastructure to digital marketplaces, healthcare and electric mobility.

Then came the company that would make his name much more widely known.

Founding Astra Tech

In March 2022, Abu-Sheikh founded Astra Tech, a technology investment and development group built around a larger ambition: consolidate high-frequency consumer services into what the company would eventually describe as an “ultra app.”

Rather than create every service internally, Astra Tech also grew through acquisitions.

That year, the group acquired Rizek, bringing Abu-Sheikh’s earlier home-services company into the new ecosystem.

It also acquired UAE fintech PayBy, giving Astra Tech a stronger payments foundation.

Then, in January 2023, it acquired the Middle Eastern communications platform Botim.

Botim would become the centerpiece of Astra Tech’s consumer strategy.

Why Botim Became More Than a Calling App

The logic behind Astra Tech was not simply to collect unrelated digital services.

Abu-Sheikh believed one of the biggest obstacles in consumer technology was changing human behavior.

Millions of people already understood how to place a call, send a message or record a voice note.

So rather than force consumers to learn an entirely new interface, Astra Tech could place additional services around actions they already performed.

Financial services became a particularly natural extension.

Abu-Sheikh developed a hypothesis: people who communicate with someone repeatedly are often financially connected to that person as well.

Parents and children.

Spouses.

Siblings.

Friends.

Migrant workers and family members abroad.

He asked Astra Tech’s data team to test whether frequent communication could correlate with demand for money transfers. The result, according to his account, strongly supported the idea.

That helped turn Botim from a communications product into a broader consumer platform involving payments, transfers and other everyday services.

The strategy was increasingly about owning more of the user’s recurring digital life.

Raising $500 Million at 26

Astra Tech’s ambitions required capital on an entirely different scale.

In December 2022, the company secured $500 million in investment, led by G42.

Abu-Sheikh was around 26 years old when the financing was raised, according to his later interview.

It was one of the largest technology investments associated with a startup platform in the region at the time.

But the capital was only part of the achievement.

Astra Tech was simultaneously assembling a portfolio of products through acquisition and integration: Rizek, PayBy and Botim became pieces of a much larger consumer ecosystem.

Abu-Sheikh’s philosophy toward fundraising was tied closely to evidence.

He described startup growth as a progression from the first handful of users to thousands, then hundreds of thousands and eventually millions. Each level reduces uncertainty.

Once a company has 100,000 people actively demonstrating demand, the conversation with investors is fundamentally different from pitching a slide deck.

Astra Tech went well beyond that threshold.

Scaling to More Than 150 Million Users

By 2024, Astra Tech had developed into a consumer technology group spanning communications, money transfers, bill payments and other services.

The company said its ecosystem had reached more than 150 million users across 155 countries.

For most founders, that scale – combined with a $500 million financing and multiple major acquisitions- would provide enough work for decades.

Abu-Sheikh instead began considering an exit.

Not because the company had failed.

Because it had worked.

Leaving Astra Tech at the Peak

In November 2024, Abu-Sheikh departed Astra Tech.

Asked later why he had left Botim and Astra while the platform was at the height of its success, he explained his preferred entrepreneurial role using a simple framework:

zero to one.

He enjoys the point where a problem exists but no adequate solution exists yet.

Building the first version.

Finding the model.

Proving demand.

Once a company moves from one to one hundred, however, much of the work becomes replication and scale.

For Abu-Sheikh, that stage is less compelling.

The explanation makes his career easier to understand.

Lux had been built and sold.

Rizek had scaled and later become part of Astra.

Barq addressed another regional infrastructure gap.

Astra had assembled and scaled an ecosystem around Botim.

Having reached one hundred, Abu-Sheikh wanted zero again.

This time, he found it in finance.

2025: Starting Again With Mal

In 2025, Abu-Sheikh founded Mal in Abu Dhabi.

The name means “wealth” in Arabic.

The ambition was substantially larger than launching another fintech application.

Abu-Sheikh wanted to build what Mal describes as the world’s first AI-native Islamic digital financial platform, with the longer-term goal of becoming a fully licensed digital bank.

The problem he identified combined scale with cultural relevance.

Islamic finance represents an industry worth approximately $7 trillion, serving or potentially serving close to two billion people.

Yet Abu-Sheikh believed there was still no defining global digital financial institution emerging from the Arab world to serve that market.

His argument was simple.

This is a problem rooted in the region and in Muslim communities globally.

Why should the Arab world wait for an American or Chinese company to solve it?

As he put it during an interview, the solution “has to come from this part of the world.”

Building an AI-Native Bank Rather Than Adding AI to Banking

Mal’s second distinction is technological.

Many established financial institutions are adding artificial-intelligence features to systems designed years or even decades earlier.

Abu-Sheikh wants Mal built in the opposite direction.

AI is intended to sit inside the platform’s core architecture from the beginning.

The goal is to connect areas traditionally fragmented across banking—earning, spending, financing, saving, investing and wealth management—through one intelligent financial system.

That could also change banking economics.

Abu-Sheikh has argued that AI can automate large portions of processes such as underwriting and loan issuance that historically involve substantial manual review.

In one example, he estimated that AI could remove roughly 70% to 80% of certain costs involved in loan issuance, replacing parts of processes that might otherwise involve dozens of employees and lengthy approval periods.

The vision is therefore not merely a smarter interface.

It is a lower-cost financial operating model.

Raising $230 Million Before Launch

Then came the milestone that placed Mal immediately among the region’s most closely watched fintech companies.

In January 2026, Mal secured $230 million in a strategic investment round led by BlueFive Capital, alongside strategic investors and family offices.

The financing was intended to support product development, licensing and regulatory work, and market-entry execution ahead of the company’s planned rollout.

Mal initially planned to launch in the UAE before expanding across the Middle East and Asia.

At the time, the business remained pre-launch and was still pursuing the regulatory approvals required to offer financial services.

But the size of the financing was extraordinary for a company at such an early stage.

Abu-Sheikh later publicly described it as “the biggest seed round in MENA’s history.”

Previous success certainly helped.

He had already built multiple companies.

He had exited businesses.

He had raised $500 million.

He had completed acquisitions.

And he had operated platforms serving more than 150 million users.

Yet Abu-Sheikh said even that track record did not make fundraising effortless.

Writing about the process afterward, he said he had expected the round to be relatively easy because of what he had built before. Instead, he encountered investors waiting for others to commit first, seeking foreign validation, and repeatedly asking who else was participating in the round.

Eventually, Mal closed with $230 million.

The number effectively transformed what could have been another fintech launch into one of the most heavily capitalized new ventures ever created in the region.

UAE-Based Fintech Mal Secures $230M Strategic Round to Build an AI-Native Islamic Digital Bank

The Central Bank Approval That Changed the Story

Funding, however, does not create a bank.

Regulation does.

In May 2026, Mal reached another milestone when it received in-principle approval from the Central Bank of the UAE to establish a fully licensed bank.

That changed the framing of the company.

Mal was no longer simply proposing a financial platform operating around the edges of traditional banking.

It was beginning the regulatory path toward becoming an actual banking institution.

The combination was unusual:

A $230 million starting position.

AI-native architecture.

Islamic financial principles.

A mobile-first model.

And an ambition to scale beyond the UAE into some of the largest underserved financial markets across the Middle East and Asia.

A Decade of Building Across Industries

Seen individually, Abu-Sheikh’s ventures can appear disconnected.

Renewable energy.

Home services.

Healthcare.

Electric mobility.

Communications.

Payments.

Banking.

Viewed chronologically, however, the progression becomes clearer.

He built Lux Development Partners, developing approximately 1.2GW of African energy projects before exiting.

He founded Rizek, raised approximately $15 million across its early rounds, expanded into multiple markets and rapidly built a healthcare vertical during the pandemic.

He co-founded Barq, attempting to create locally designed electric mobility infrastructure for MENA.

Then came Astra Tech, followed by the acquisitions of Rizek, PayBy and Botim.

At roughly 26, he raised $500 million.

Astra Tech then grew its ecosystem to more than 150 million users across 155 countries.

And in 2024, he walked away.

The following year, he founded Mal.

Then, in January 2026, the serial entrepreneur who had already spent more than a decade moving from one unsolved problem to another raised $230 million for his newest company—the biggest seed round in MENA’s history, by his own description.

A few months later, Mal secured in-principle approval to take the next step toward becoming a licensed bank.

For Abu-Sheikh, the sequence may ultimately matter more than any single company.

His career has repeatedly followed the same arc:

build, scale, move on, begin again.

When Hamad Al Hajri launched Snoonu in Doha in 2019, Qatar’s delivery market was already attracting international platforms with larger budgets, established technology, and experience operating across multiple countries.

Competing directly with them appeared difficult.

But Al Hajri believed those companies were missing something important.

They understood delivery.

They did not necessarily understand Qatar.

Local merchants needed more flexible digital tools. Consumers wanted services designed around their daily habits. Businesses required logistics partners capable of responding quickly to a relatively small but demanding market.

Instead of copying an international delivery model, Snoonu was built around those local realities.

What began as an on-demand delivery startup gradually expanded into food, groceries, e-commerce, courier services, pharmacy orders, home services, gifts, and logistics.

Within six years, Snoonu had become one of Qatar’s most important technology companies—and the center of one of the largest startup transactions in the country’s history.

Building a Qatari Platform Around a Local Problem

Al Hajri came to entrepreneurship after spending years working across technology, innovation, and business operations.

His experience convinced him that Qatar did not simply need another delivery application. It needed locally developed digital infrastructure capable of connecting consumers, merchants, and logistics providers through one platform.

The name Snoonu was inspired by the Arabic word for the swallow, a bird associated with speed, agility, and the ability to return home.

That symbolism reflected the early product.

Snoonu initially focused on personal concierge and delivery services through a bilingual platform designed specifically for users and merchants in Qatar.

Building the marketplace required more than writing software.

Many traditional businesses had limited digital inventories, fragmented ordering systems, and little experience managing sales through mobile platforms. Snoonu’s team worked directly with merchants to digitize products and connect them to a growing online customer base.

The company was not only delivering orders.

It was helping local businesses participate in the digital economy.

Before Snoonu: Two Failed Attempts and a Costly Technology Lesson

Snoonu’s official launch came in 2019, but Hamad Al Hajri had been trying to turn the concept into a real company for several years.

According to Al Hajri, speaking in two podcast interviews about Snoonu’s early journey, the idea began taking clearer shape while he was studying at HEC Paris in Doha in 2016. He and his co-founder developed the concept as a university capstone project, which was recognized as one of the institution’s strongest projects. Rather than leaving it inside the classroom, they decided to test whether it could become a real business.

The first attempts did not work.

In one of them, Al Hajri and his partners tried to accelerate the launch by purchasing a ready-made delivery application from a development company in India for approximately QAR 100,000. The supplier presented a professional office, promised that the platform would be ready within six months, and gave the team enough confidence that Al Hajri publicly announced an upcoming launch on television and prepared to present the project at an event.

Then the application arrived.

It barely worked.

When the team requested corrections, the supplier stopped responding. Al Hajri later travelled to Delhi and found the office empty and the people behind the company gone. The project had to be suspended, and the money was effectively lost.

The failure produced the decision that would later define Snoonu.

Al Hajri concluded that he was not trying to build a logistics company that happened to use someone else’s software. He was trying to build a technology company specializing in logistics.

If technology represented the company’s core advantage, it could not remain under the control of an external vendor.

Snoonu would have to own its product, its engineering capabilities, and the systems responsible for every order moving through the platform.

He later described a second failed attempt that exposed another weakness. This time, the company had greater control over the product, but had tried to build the team at the lowest possible cost. The experience convinced him that owning the technology was not enough; Snoonu also needed to invest in stronger engineers and product talent capable of building it properly.

Those two failures shaped the model that eventually succeeded.

Build the technology internally.

And hire the strongest team the company could afford.

Years later, Snoonu would employ hundreds of people, including a large internal technology organization spanning engineering, data science, product management, business intelligence, and product design. What appeared at the time to be an expensive failure had forced the company to identify the capability that would become central to its long-term value

Selling One Business to Keep Snoonu Alive

Al Hajri did not enter Snoonu with unlimited venture capital behind him.

Before the company reached institutional investors, part of its survival depended on another business he had built years earlier.

In 2012, he had launched a technology services company with approximately QAR 100,000 in initial capital. The business operated across areas such as low-voltage systems, smart homes, automation, and related engineering services. Rather than withdrawing its annual profits, he repeatedly reinvested them to increase the company’s capital and expand its operations.

By 2019, he sold the company for around QAR 8 million.

The exit was not simply a separate entrepreneurial achievement. According to Al Hajri, it became a critical source of funding for Snoonu after potential investors withdrew and the new company found itself financially constrained. He sold the profitable services business to inject capital into the technology venture that had not yet proved it could survive.

The decision captured the risk surrounding Snoonu’s earliest years.

Al Hajri was not moving from one successful company into a comfortably funded startup. He was converting the value of a proven business into runway for a venture that had already failed more than once

Growing Through a Moment of Disruption

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated consumer adoption of online delivery across Qatar and the wider region.

People who had previously viewed delivery as an occasional convenience increasingly depended on it for food, groceries, medicines, and daily essentials.

Snoonu responded by expanding beyond its initial services.

The platform added new categories, increased its delivery capacity, strengthened its logistics infrastructure, and developed technology capable of managing rapidly growing order volumes.

Rather than remaining a food-delivery marketplace, Snoonu began moving toward a broader multi-service model.

Its growing ecosystem included restaurant delivery, grocery commerce, pharmacy services, B2B and B2C courier solutions, and products such as SnooSend and SnooMart.

The shift would eventually become central to the company’s identity.

Snoonu was no longer positioning itself as a delivery app.

It was becoming a Qatari super app.

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Proving That Local Technology Could Compete

Snoonu’s competitive advantage did not come from spending more than international rivals.

It came from moving closer to the market.

The company built an Arabic-first experience, developed relationships with local merchants, and adapted its services to Qatari consumer behavior.

That local understanding helped it respond more quickly to market needs while building a brand closely associated with Qatar’s technology ambitions.

The 2022 FIFA World Cup became an important test.

Qatar experienced an unprecedented rise in visitors, transactions, events, and demand for urban services. Snoonu expanded its operations and technology infrastructure to manage the pressure while supporting merchants and consumers during one of the most visible periods in the country’s history.

The experience demonstrated that a locally developed platform could operate at significant scale.

It also strengthened Snoonu’s position as a national technology company rather than merely another delivery provider.

The Funding Round That Nearly Broke the Company

Even after Snoonu gained traction, its survival was not guaranteed.

In the School of Investment podcast, Al Hajri revealed that the company’s second investment round collapsed in April 2022. Snoonu had expanded aggressively and committed capital based on the expectation that the financing would close. When it failed, the company was left facing liabilities he described as approaching QAR 40 million and without enough liquidity to continue operating normally. A few months later, amid the pressure, he was hospitalized after suffering a stroke.

The company had reached the kind of moment that rarely appears in polished startup timelines.

It was growing.

It had customers.

It had built a recognizable brand.

And it was close to running out of money.

Al Hajri gathered the team and explained the situation directly: without immediate action, Snoonu could close. Employees were asked to temporarily accept reductions that reached 50% of their salaries while the company worked to secure new capital. The proposal placed part of the burden of survival on the same people who had built the platform, but many agreed to remain rather than walk away. The episode later became the central subject of the podcast interview in which he recounted the company’s financing journey.

Snoonu eventually secured approximately $12 million from investors, giving the company the capital needed to continue scaling. Al Hajri has since argued that the business raised relatively little compared with many regional delivery companies, yet reached profitability in its third year rather than remaining permanently dependent on new rounds.

The crisis also makes Snoonu’s later acquisition easier to understand.

The $320 million valuation was not the inevitable outcome of a smooth funding journey. It followed failed launches, lost capital, an externally built application that never worked, the sale of another company to fund operations, and an investment round collapse that brought Snoonu close to shutting down.

Its strongest foundation was not delivery alone.

It was the decision, made after the first failure, to own the technology behind the business

From Delivery App to Profitable Super App

By 2024, Snoonu had evolved into a multi-vertical platform with increasingly strong financial performance.

Over two years, its gross merchandise value tripled to approximately QAR 1.37 billion, equivalent to around $377 million.

Revenue increased from QAR 146 million to QAR 511 million during the same period.

More importantly, the company was not pursuing growth at any cost.

Snoonu reported QAR 54 million in EBITDA and QAR 27 million in net profit in 2024, demonstrating that its model could scale while remaining profitable.

Those figures distinguished the company from many delivery startups that expanded rapidly but struggled to build sustainable economics.

Snoonu had managed to deepen its home-market position, broaden the services available through its platform, and develop a business attractive to one of the region’s largest publicly listed delivery companies.

The $245 Million Jahez Deal

The defining corporate milestone arrived in July 2025.

Saudi-listed on-demand platform Jahez Group signed a definitive agreement to acquire a 76.56% majority stake in Snoonu through a transaction valued at approximately $245 million.

The deal included $225 million for 75% of Snoonu’s existing shares and a further $20 million capital injection in exchange for a newly issued 1.56% stake.

Saudi Delivery Giant Jahez Buys Majority Stake in Qatar’s Snoonu for $245M, Marking First Qatari Unicorn

The transaction valued Snoonu at approximately $320 million on a post-money basis.

For Qatar’s startup ecosystem, the deal represented more than a large acquisition.

It marked the emergence of the country’s first startup to cross the $300 million valuation threshold and demonstrated that a locally founded technology company could produce a major regional outcome.

For Jahez, the acquisition offered an immediate entry into Qatar through an established, profitable platform with strong local recognition.

For Snoonu, it provided additional capital, infrastructure, and regional reach without requiring the company to abandon the identity that had made it successful.

Preserving Founder Leadership After the Acquisition

Majority acquisitions often bring uncertainty around brand identity and founder control.

Snoonu’s agreement with Jahez was structured differently.

The company would continue operating under the Snoonu brand, while Al Hajri retained a 23.44% ownership stake and remained founder and CEO.

He also joined the newly formed board alongside three Jahez representatives.

The arrangement preserved the founder’s operational role while connecting Snoonu to a larger regional group.

It also reflected the strategic logic behind the transaction.

Jahez was not acquiring Snoonu simply to absorb its users or eliminate a competitor.

It was investing in a locally built platform, leadership team, and technology ecosystem capable of supporting broader Gulf expansion.

The two companies identified potential collaboration across logistics, customer service, product development, and platform technology.

Snoonu’s local agility could now be combined with Jahez’s financial resources and regional infrastructure.

Taking the Model Beyond Qatar

Snoonu’s next major challenge was proving that its success could travel beyond its home market.

In April 2026, the company officially expanded into Kuwait with a phased rollout of its super app.

The initial services included e-commerce, courier delivery, car washing, home maintenance, gifts, and flowers, followed by restaurants, supermarkets, and pharmacies.

Rather than attempting to manage Kuwait remotely, Snoonu onboarded approximately 180 employees and appointed local leadership under CEO Bader Al-Ajeel.

The approach reflected a lesson from the company’s success in Qatar.

Regional scale could not come at the expense of localization.

Each market required teams capable of understanding its merchants, customers, regulations, and operational environment.

Kuwait became an important test of whether Snoonu could combine a standardized technology platform with deeply localized execution.

Qatar-Based Super App Snoonu Officially Expands Into Kuwait, Launching Multi-Service Operations With 180 Employees

Recycling Success Into Qatar’s Next Generation of Founders

As Snoonu expanded beyond Qatar, Hamad Al Hajri also began widening his role inside the country’s startup ecosystem. Rather than focusing solely on scaling his own company, he started channeling capital, operational experience, and mentorship back into the next generation of founders.

In April 2026, Snoonu launched Snoonu Startup Factory, Qatar’s first founder-led startup factory and accelerator. The initiative was created to invest in and mentor early-stage startups across Qatar and the wider GCC, reflecting Al Hajri’s belief that successful operators should help build the ecosystem that once lacked support for them.

Qatar-Based Super App Snoonu Launches Startup Factory to Support Early-Stage Founders, Starting With First $100K Investment in Sufra AI

The factory announced its first investment immediately: a $100,000 pre-seed round in Sufra AI, an AI-powered restaurant technology startup founded by Carnegie Mellon University Qatar graduates Ekaterina Demenkova and Jemal Velihanova. The company is developing intelligent QR-based restaurant menus that personalize recommendations, automate ordering and payments, and provide restaurants with real-time customer insights.

For Al Hajri, the initiative represents more than a new investment vehicle. It marks a transition from building a single successful company to helping create many more. In a region where experienced founders have historically remained operators, Snoonu Startup Factory signals the emergence of a new generation of founder-investors capable of recycling both capital and hard-earned execution experience back into the ecosystem

Adding Financial Services to the Ecosystem

Snoonu’s regional strategy also extends beyond delivery and commerce.

In Oman, the company signed a strategic memorandum of understanding with Sohar International to integrate banking and financing services into the Snoonu ecosystem.

The partnership is designed to support merchants, delivery partners, and consumers through customized financial products.

SMEs operating through the platform could gain access to financing for business growth, while delivery partners could use asset-financing programs to expand their fleets.

The collaboration illustrates how super apps evolve.

Once a platform connects consumers, merchants, orders, logistics, and payments, it can gradually introduce financial services around those relationships.

Snoonu is therefore moving beyond facilitating transactions.

It is attempting to create an integrated digital and financial environment supporting the different participants in its marketplace.

Technology Beyond Human Delivery

The company’s longer-term vision reaches further into automation.

Snoonu has outlined an ambition to achieve fully robotic delivery operations by 2035 through autonomous ground vehicles and drones.

That objective remains distant and will depend on technology, infrastructure, economics, and regulation.

Yet it demonstrates how the company views itself.

Snoonu does not want to remain a conventional delivery operator with a mobile application.

It wants to become a technology and logistics platform capable of redesigning how goods and services move through Gulf cities.

Its “No Drivers Under the Sun” initiative reflects the same direction, combining operational innovation with an effort to improve conditions for delivery workers exposed to the region’s extreme temperatures.

Building a Regional Champion Without Losing Its Roots

Snoonu’s evolution captures a broader transformation taking place across the Gulf technology ecosystem.

For years, many of the region’s largest digital platforms were imported from outside markets.

Today, companies built in Riyadh, Doha, Dubai, and other Gulf cities are increasingly developing their own technology, expanding across borders, acquiring competitors, and attracting public-market capital.

Snoonu represents one of Qatar’s clearest examples of that shift.

It began by solving a local delivery problem.

It expanded by helping merchants digitize.

It evolved into a profitable multi-service platform.

It then secured a $320 million valuation while preserving its brand and founder leadership, before taking its model into Kuwait and building financial partnerships in Oman.

The journey is not simply about creating a successful delivery company.

It is about proving that a technology platform born in Qatar can become relevant across the Gulf.

For Hamad Al Hajri, the strategic challenge ahead will be balancing three forces: the local identity that built Snoonu, the regional scale made possible through Jahez, and the operational discipline required to expand across highly competitive markets.

The company’s first six years suggest that its greatest advantage may still be the same one that shaped it at the beginning.

It was built close to the people and businesses it serves.