Syria’s Tech Recovery Starts With the Idea of Home
When the Assad regime fell on 8 December 2024, Syrian tech entrepreneur Bahila Hijazi was celebrating with friends on the streets of Berlin. Days later, she was thinking about something far more practical: where Syrians abroad would stay when they finally went home. “A feeling of responsibility emerged,” the 32-year-old
Iraq’s Startups Aren’t Disrupting. They’re Rebuilding
In Iraq’s emerging startup scene, ideas are not the problem. The bottleneck is everything around them: infrastructure that doesn’t hold, capital that is hard to access, and regulation that is still catching up. Even the most ambitious founders are building in a country where the basics are unreliable. In Mosul
Messi and Ronaldo Are Building Tech Portfolios. Mo Salah Is Playing a Different Game
Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Mohamed Salah have spent the past two decades defining one of football’s greatest eras. Now, as the 2026 FIFA World Cup marks Ronaldo’s final appearance at the tournament and another defining moment in the careers of Messi and Salah, they’re also preparing for life beyond
Saudi Arabia’s Next Startup Wave Is Split Between Compute and Circularity
The Middle East’s start-up ecosystem is packed with new bets, spanning sectors as diverse as fintech, life sciences and AI. Saudi Arabia, in particular, is emerging as a high-volume testbed for founders, with accelerators, research centres and government-backed initiatives expanding the pipeline. According to MAGNiTT’s 2025 Emerging Venture Markets Report,
Bahrain’s Tech Boom Is Built on Water, Waste and Words
Bahrain’s start-up scene isn’t trying to out-hype the Gulf. It’s trying to solve real problems at home — producing drinking water from air, replacing plastic packaging with compostable alternatives, and building AI that sounds native in the region’s dialects. Out of Thin Air Named Bahrain’s top strategic start-up at last
Kuwait’s Climate Startups Are Building for the Real Economy
“Innovation often arrives faster than it can be absorbed,” says António Azevedo Campos, cofounder and CEO of Hub2Energy. In the Gulf, where start-ups often prioritise fast-scaling consumer platforms, the gap between new technology and real-world implementation can be wide. Hub2Energy is trying to close it. The Kuwait-based company works on
Tunisia’s Startup Boom Started With One Exit
In 2023, BioNTech, the German biotech company behind the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine, bought InstaDeep, a Tunisian AI startup. InstaDeep develops AI tools that help businesses make decisions, focusing on both research and practical use. The $549 million deal was a milestone for Tunisia, showing that the country can export advanced
Lebanon’s Startups Are Rising Above Crisis to Transform the Country’s Economy
When Lebanon’s currency collapsed and public services began to fail, founders were forced to build under conditions that most startup ecosystems never test for: unreliable electricity, frozen banking systems, and a shrinking domestic market. What emerged was not a pause in innovation, but a shift in how it happens. Rather
Inside the Startups Rebuilding Systems in Yemen
For more than a decade, Yemen has dominated global imagination through a narrow and unrelenting frame. News coverage has been dominated by airstrikes, humanitarian appeals and political deadlock, reducing a complex country to a shorthand of crisis. Yet this lens rarely captures how life has continued in parallel to the
Years of War Made Lebanon a Blueprint for Mental Health Tech
Luma Makari was in an online meeting about her company last week when the bombings in Lebanon began. Working from her family home in Beirut, the 25-year-old Lebanese tech entrepreneur rushed to open her windows to prevent them from shattering from the blasts, a practice many people in parts of
