For years, the question among Silicon Valley's elite wasn't if they'd invest in the Gulf—it was when, and on what terms. Andreessen Horowitz answered that question last week: Riyadh, banking infrastructure, $25 million.
The firm led a Series A round in Stitch, a four-year-old startup building what it calls a modular operating system for banks and fintechs. The May 14 investment represents a16z's inaugural deal in Saudi Arabia and the wider GCC, a signal that perhaps the region's fintech ambitions are finally ready for primetime scrutiny from Sand Hill Road.
The round drew participation from Arbor Ventures, COTU Ventures, Raed Ventures, and the Saudi Venture Capital Company—all returnees from Stitch's $10 million seed a year earlier. Total raised: $35 million.
The Infrastructure Thesis
Alex Rampell and James da Costa, the a16z general partners who championed the deal, framed their rationale around a premise that's become something of a refrain in fintech circles: AI means nothing if your foundation is crumbling. In their May 13 announcement, they positioned Stitch as the antidote—a "modern, unified system of record" designed for institutions still tethered to decades-old core banking platforms.
Mohamed Oueida, Stitch's founder and CEO, put it more bluntly. "AI on top of broken infrastructure is a dead end," he said in the company's release. It's a pitch tailored for the moment. Banks across the Middle East and North Africa want the upside of generative models and real-time decisioning. What they have instead are patchwork systems that can barely talk to one another.
What Stitch Actually Builds
Announced as founded in 2022, Stitch offers a cloud-native platform that financial institutions can adopt piecemeal—ledgers here, card processing there, loan origination somewhere else—without the existential risk of gutting their entire technology stack in one go. The company claims its approach can cut time-to-launch by as much as 80 percent, though such figures are notoriously difficult to verify and often depend heavily on the starting conditions.
Its client roster includes Raya Financing, which handles lending for Hyundai and Peugeot dealerships across the region, alongside LuLu Exchange, Noqodi, and Foodics. Stitch has expanded beyond the GCC into parts of Africa—Egypt and Kenya, notably—and into Southeast Asia, a geographic spread that suggests either ambitious vision or the opportunistic pursuit of early traction. Perhaps both.
Growth, With the Usual Caveats
According to a16z's investment memo, Stitch processed more than $5 billion in transaction volume during the six months leading up to the announcement. Customer count, the firm noted, grew tenfold in 2025, according to company and a16z reporting. Revenue? Twenty times over the same stretch, by the same account.
Those multiples sound impressive—and likely are—but they also arrive from a small base, as most early-stage metrics do, and remain unaudited by independent parties. What's harder to dismiss is the timing. Just weeks before Stitch announced its Series A, Saudi Arabia's central bank began licensing fintechs for open banking services on March 26, following a sandbox phase that laid the regulatory groundwork. If Stitch is positioning itself as the infrastructure layer for that new era, the calendar is cooperating.
The company says it will deploy the fresh capital toward product development, deeper penetration across MENA, and global go-to-market expansion—a familiar roadmap for startups navigating the gap between early product-market fit and something resembling scale. Latham & Watkins and Walkers advised on the transaction.
For Andreessen Horowitz, the bet is as much about timing and positioning as it is about Stitch itself. The GCC has money, ambition, and increasingly, regulatory tailwinds. What it's historically lacked is the kind of technical infrastructure that can support the fintech ecosystems taking shape in places like Southeast Asia or Latin America.
Stitch is wagering it can be the foundation. Whether that foundation holds—well, that's what Series A capital is for.
