Saudi Arabia-Based Stitch Raises US$25 Million Series A Led By Silicon Valley's Andreessen Horowitz In Its First GCC Investment

Saudi Arabia-based fintech startup Stitch has raised US$25 million in a Series A funding round led by Silicon Valley-based venture capital (VC) firm Andreessen Horowitz (also known as a16z), marking its first investment in the GCC.

The new round, which also saw participation from existing investors like Hong Kong-based Arbor Ventures, UAE-based COTU Ventures, KSA-based Raed Ventures, and Saudi Venture Capital Company (SVC), has brought the investment Stitch has secured since inception to $35 million. 

Founded by Mohamed Oueida in KSA in 2022, Stitch develops a cloud-native operating system for financial institutions across lending, cards, payments, and ledgers that enables them to modernize legacy infrastructure gradually through a modular approach, rather than replacing systems in a single transition. But such an approach does not stop at infrastructure for Stitch—in an interview with Inc. Arabia, Oueida noted that it also shapes how the company has built itself to operate across geographies.

“The surface problem is identical everywhere," Oueida said. "Fragmented systems, slow product launches, mounting infrastructure debt—every market we operate in has that in common. But the texture of the problem differs, and that texture shapes how we build. We’ve built a unified core and localized at the edges. The ledger, the application programming interface (API) layer, and the compliance framework, those are consistent everywhere. What adapts is the local payment rail connectivity, the language support, and the regulatory reporting module. We don't build a different product for each market. We build one platform that is genuinely designed for the world's most demanding markets, rather than retrofitted for them.”  

As Oueida highlighted, despite the financial sector’s heavy spending on digital transformation, the operational challenges that Stitch targets continue to affect institutions globally. Banks worldwide reportedly spend around $700 billion annually on technology, yet launching new products and upgrading core systems remains a lengthy and operationally sensitive process, even after financial institutions globally invested more than $1 trillion in digital transformation initiatives over the past three years. The growing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) has also added pressure on financial institutions to modernize infrastructure, particularly as deploying AI tools increasingly depends on integrated systems of record.  

In a statement, Alex Rampell, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, noted that the growing infrastructure burden facing financial institutions was one of the factors driving his firm’s investment in Stitch. “Financial institutions are sitting on decades of infrastructure debt, and that debt is now the single biggest obstacle to AI adoption," Rampell said. "What Stitch is building—a modern, unified system of record—is what makes everything else possible. We're excited to support them, and honored to make this our first investment in the region." 

With operations across the GCC, Africa, and Southeast Asia, Stitch plans to use its new capital to support product development, expansion across the MENA, and its global go-to-market strategy. Stitch's customer base currently includes Raya Financing, the lending arm of automotive brands Hyundai and Peugeot, UAE-based financial services company LuLu Exchange, UAE-based fintech Noqodi, and Riyadh-based restaurant and payment technology company Foodics. The company claims to have seen a 10x increase in its customer base in 2025, with revenue growing by 20x over the same period; in the last six months alone, Stitch has processed more than $5 billion in transactions through its platform. 

Pictured in the lead image is Stitch founder Mohamed Oueida. Image courtesy Stitch.