Sovra, Founded By Lebanese Entrepreneur Ahmad Wehbi, Raises More Than US$2 Million To Expand Its Self-Custodial Dollar Account Platform

US-headquartered Sovra, a fintech startup developing a platform for self-custodial dollar accounts, has pocketed more than US$2 million in a pre-seed funding round led by New York-based venture capital (VC) firm Pharsalus Capital, with participation from regional and international angel investors, including Karim Atiyeh, founder of the New York-based financial operations platform Ramp, Hisham Al-Falih, founder of Riyadh-based open banking platform Lean Technologies, and Hany Rashwan, founder of Zurich-based crypto asset manager 21Shares. 

Founded by Lebanese entrepreneur Ahmad Wehbi in 2025, Sovra enables users to hold digital dollars, earn yield, transfer money internationally, and make payments through a card accepted across Visa and Mastercard networks. The platform is built on a self-custodial model, allowing users to maintain direct control over their funds without relying on intermediaries to access their accounts. Operating with a distributed team across the Middle East and Europe, Sovra plans to use the funding to expand its engineering and product teams as it prepares for a public launch. The company has established a waitlist for prospective users while platform development continues. 

In an interview with Inc. Arabia, Wehbi, who's also the CEO of Sovra, said that the idea for the enterprise emerged during Lebanon's financial crisis in 2019, when he saw how easily people could get locked out of their life savings. That experience eventually led him to establish Sovra as a platform that allows people to manage their money without an intermediary. “Our mission is to build the simplest way for people to own, protect, and grow their money," Wehbi said. "The promise is: you send, earn, spend, and transact in dollars from your phone, and only you can access them. If Sovra disappeared tomorrow, your money would still be there." 

At the core of the Sovra platform is the ability for users to hold balances denominated in USDC, a US dollar-backed stablecoin issued by the global fintech company, Circle, through its mobile application, where each digital dollar is backed by a corresponding US dollar held in reserve. Users can also transfer funds between accounts at no cost, use payment cards linked to their balances, and connect their funds to third-party decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols offering yield opportunities. This offering is particularly relevant in the MENA, where, according to Sovra, nearly two-thirds of adults in the region remain unbanked or underbanked. Cross-border remittances can also be costly and time-consuming, with fees often exceeding six percent and transfers taking several days to settle. Additionally, in some markets, consumers also face inflation, currency depreciation, withdrawal restrictions, and limited access to their savings. 

For Wehbi, these are the challenges that Sovra aims to address. “The global fintech revolution delivered on its promise: faster, cheaper, more connected. But the parts of the world that were already excluded, it excluded again,” he said. “In some cases, you needed a bank account just to onboard onto a fintech in the first place. In others, services wrote off entire countries in our region outright. And in those excluded places, the conditions that make money hard never went away: trust in institutions is low, the cost of sending and spending is high, and cash still wins, because nothing better exists. Sovra is built for exactly those places, and it does two things differently. First, inclusion: we give people access to a digital dollar account from almost anywhere, with no bank account required to start. Second, and this is the deeper one, we do not ask you to trust us. Most fintechs widen access but keep the same old arrangement, where an institution holds your money, and you hope it stays available. With Sovra, only you can access your money. We remove that dependency entirely. That is what closes the gap. Not just reaching the people the system left out, but giving them money that answers only to them.” 

Sovra is initially focused on three customer segments: young professionals across the MENA, university students, and members of the region's diaspora. Through Sovra's self-custodial architecture, users have direct ownership of their assets, with the platform functioning as the underlying infrastructure layer. The company integrates with a range of financial and digital asset service providers to deliver its offering. According to Wehbi, the relevance of such a model becomes even more apparent during periods of economic and political uncertainty, when concerns around access to and control over personal finances tend to become more pronounced. Ongoing geopolitical tensions could thus further accelerate interest in solutions that allow individuals to hold and manage their own funds independently. 

From Wehbi's standpoint, Sovra’s utilization of new tools to address such challenges was key to attracting investors to the company. “Our investors saw two things: the depth of the problem, and the fact that the technology to solve it now exists," he said. "These are people who have built world-class products themselves, and seen firsthand what technology can do for real-world problems. Property rights and personal sovereignty are fundamental, and for the first time, they can be realized through systems that no longer require you to trust an intermediary with your money. What they backed was the relationship that becomes possible when that intermediary is gone: a direct one, between people and what they own. The work left to do is the last mile. Taking that technology and making it simple enough for anyone to use, in a way that fits how they already live and already handle money.” 

Looking to the future, Wehbi said that Sovra's immediate priority is building a product shaped by user behavior while remaining focused on a longer-term ambition to enable financial ownership and accessibility. “Long-term, success is millions of people across the MENA and beyond owning their financial lives, whoever they are and wherever they were born," he said. "Nearer-term, it is concrete: launch well, earn that first deposit, and become the account people reach for every day. Right now, we are focused on getting the fundamentals right, and learning from the people using it, because the product that launches well is the one that has already been shaped by real use."

Drawing on his experience building Sovra, Wehbi advised other fintech entrepreneurs to build clarity into their product from day one. “Build for a problem you genuinely understand, ideally one you have lived," he said. "Treat simplicity as the product, not the packaging, because our whole job is to make complex infrastructure disappear behind something anyone can use. And remember that trust is not won with a campaign. It is won quietly, every time someone deposits, sees it work, and takes their money out without a problem, again and again. If you do that consistently, the rest follows."

Pictured in the lead image is Sovra founder and CEO Ahmad Wehbi. Image courtesy Sovra.