A U.S. venture firm just wired $25 million into a Riyadh startup while Brent crude trades at $106 and the Strait of Hormuz is still running on a handshake.
Stitch, founded in 2022 by Mohamed Oueida, builds core banking infrastructure a cloud-native stack covering lending, cards, payments, and ledgers for financial institutions that have spent decades layering software on top of software they should have replaced years ago. The company says it processed more than $5 billion in transactions over the past six months, with revenue up 20x in 2025. Andreessen Horowitz led the round. It is the firm’s first investment anywhere in the GCC.
The timing matters more than the amount. Global funds have been pulling exposure from the region since February, when the Iran conflict started. The fact that a16z moved anyway into infrastructure software, not consumer, not AI hype says something about where institutional conviction still exists. GP Alex Rampell put it plainly: financial institutions are sitting on decades of infrastructure debt, and that debt is the single biggest obstacle to AI adoption. Oueida’s pitch is that AI on top of broken core banking is just expensive noise. He’s not wrong, and Gulf banks know it.
Saudi Arabia dominated MENA funding this week across the board. Aumet closed a $12M Series A for AI-driven healthcare procurement. Stream added $5.2M to its seed for B2B billing infrastructure. Neither is a moonshot. Both are software businesses with paying enterprise customers. That’s the pattern worth noticing: capital is still moving in the Kingdom, but it’s going to companies that look more like utilities than startups.
TruKKer closed a $300M trade receivables securitisation facility from Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank Sharia-compliant, non-recourse, backed by freight receivables across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Türkiye. It is among the first multi-jurisdictional asset-backed structures for a tech startup in the region. The practical point: TruKKer pays carriers fast; enterprise shippers pay slow. This facility funds the gap. Equity can’t do that efficiently at scale, and this deal shows Gulf banks willing to build the credit structures that make it possible.
Meanwhile, Mubadala is not sitting on its Hormuz exposure. Abu Dhabi’s sovereign fund joined a $9.75 billion financing package for Commonwealth LNG’s Louisiana export facility, holding a 24.1% stake. At the same time, the UAE announced it will accelerate construction of the Fujairah pipeline to double bypass capacity by 2027. The strategy is clear: Abu Dhabi is hedging on both ends dollar-denominated LNG revenue offshore, reduced Hormuz dependency at home.
The BRICS foreign ministers’ meeting in New Delhi ran headfirst into the Iran-UAE rift. Iranian FM Abbas Araqchi accused the UAE directly of playing a military role against Iran, which complicated any joint communiqué on maritime security. Indian FM Jaishankar noted the obvious Hormuz and the Red Sea are non-negotiable for global trade but BRICS members could not agree on language. For investors, the practical signal is that there is no multilateral framework managing Hormuz right now. What there is: two Qatari LNG tankers that crossed the strait this week under an Iran-approved corridor, with Pakistan acting as intermediary. It works until it doesn’t.
Two more Qatari LNG cargoes are expected through Hormuz to Pakistan in the coming days. Watch whether they cross without conditions attached. And watch the Trump-Xi meeting: U.S. officials have said they will press Beijing to join a multilateral maritime security operation for Hormuz. If China says no or yes with caveats that answer reshapes how every Gulf government hedges between Washington and Beijing for the next two years.