FWDstart

Omar founded COLABS in Pakistan in 2019 after leaving a career in banking and private equity, turning an old towel factory into the company’s first location and, from there, building a network of flexible workspaces used by everyone from freelancers and startups to large multinationals.

That business has since become the base for a much bigger regional ambition. COLABS has moved its headquarters to Saudi Arabia, where Omar now spends most of his time and sees the Kingdom as the biggest opportunity for the company’s next phase of growth.

Getting there wasn’t straightforward. Omar spent six months trying to finance the expansion, taking more than 100 investor meetings and hearing no repeatedly, to the point that he was ready to walk away altogether. That experience sits at the heart of the episode, as we get into what it takes to scale beyond your home market and why Omar believes Saudi can become the centre of gravity for the business.

We also dig into the economics of coworking, why COLABS wants landlords rather than shareholders funding much of its fit-out, why location matters so much, and how community can become a genuine commercial advantage without pretending the underlying business is anything other than real estate.

And there’s a more personal story here too, about burnout, purpose and what years of building through Covid, fundraising and expansion have taught Omar about resilience.

We cover:

– Why Omar thinks COLABS is fundamentally a real estate company
What WeWork got wrong and what it proved about flexible offices
– The economics of coworking, occupancy, tenant mix and asset-light expansion
– Building COLABS from Pakistan and adapting the model for Saudi Arabia
– Why Omar believes there is room for a MENA-native regional workspace platform
– Fundraising rejection, resilience and learning to build without burning out

-----------------------------------------------

00:00 Intro
00:52 What is COLABS really?
03:00 Why coworking is still a real estate business
08:00 Burnout, banking and starting COLABS
14:00 Finding purpose as a founder
17:00 Why location matters more than almost anything else
20:00 Building an asset-light real estate model
23:00 How COLABS’ customer mix has changed
29:00 The economics of coworking
32:00 Churn, pricing and the true cost of flexible offices
36:00 Taking the Pakistan playbook to Saudi Arabia
38:00 Why Omar is betting on Saudi
43:00 Moving COLABS’ centre of gravity to the Kingdom
47:00 Raising for Saudi and hearing “no” 100+ times
51:00 The founder rollercoaster
53:00 Relationships, resilience and what Omar has learned as CEO

-----------------------------------------------

Transcript: https://share.transistor.fm/s/d13e2d0c/transcript.txt

-----------------------------------------------

Follow Jamie Lane on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamienlane/ 

Follow Jamie Lane on X:
https://x.com/jamienlane 

Follow Omar Shah on LinkedIn: 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/osshah/

Check out COLABS:
https://www.colabs.sa/

Follow FWDstart on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/fwdstart/ 

Follow FWDstart on TikTok:
https://www.tiktok.com/@fwdstart 

Visit our Website:
https://www.fwdstart.me/ 

Subscribe to our Newsletter:
https://www.fwdstart.me/subscribe

Most startup fundraising advice tends to sound good in theory but becomes much less useful once you are actually in the middle of a round. Founders are told to build relationships, create momentum and find the right investors, but the practical details of how to do that are usually left unsaid.

So for this episode, I sat down with Jawad Shreim, co-founder and CEO of MilkStraw AI, and Nauman Ali, co-founder and CEO of Orbii, two founders who have both recently been through the process themselves, to unpack how they approached it in practice.

Jawad recently raised a $2 million seed round for MilkStraw, while Orbii raised $3.6 million after initially setting out to raise $2 million. Both began laying the groundwork months before formally opening their rounds, using regular investor updates to build relationships, generate inbound and understand which funds were actually engaging with the business. Jawad ultimately built a list of roughly 100 investors, compressed his meetings into a short fundraising sprint and closed the round in around 45 days.  

From there, the conversation gets unusually tactical. We get into how to create FOMO without losing control of the process, whether to tell investors who else you are speaking to, when to set a hard deadline, how to diligence a VC properly and what “value add” should actually look like once someone is on your cap table.

We also spend time on the less glamorous mechanics that founders often encounter for the first time while fundraising, including SAFEs, liquidation preferences, side letters and the gap between signing a deal and actually seeing the money arrive in the bank. 

Finally, we talk about what happens once the round is closed and why both founders treated their funding announcements as something to actively optimise for customer, talent, partnership and future investor inbound, rather than simply another PR moment. 

If you are raising now, expect to raise eventually, or simply want a clearer picture of what actually sits behind those “startup raises $Xm” headlines, there is a lot in this one.

We cover:

•  When a fundraise really starts, and why both founders begin months before formally opening the round 
•  How investor updates can create inbound and help qualify the right funds 
•  Stacking meetings, building momentum, setting deadlines and creating FOMO 
•  How to diligence VCs and assess whether “value add” is actually real 
•  SAFEs, liquidation preferences, side letters and what happens before money hits the bank 
•  How to turn a funding announcement into actual business value

-----------------------------------------------

00:00 Highlights
01:10 When does a fundraise actually start?
07:50 Using investor newsletters to build interest
13:35 Doing due diligence on your investors
17:15 What value do VCs actually add?
22:40 Closing a round in 45 days
33:50 Liquidation preferences and preferred shares
40:55 Losing term sheets over Palestine
42:05 SAFEs, side letters and asking for what you want
46:20 Turning funding announcements into customers
54:20 Hiring slowly and building a team you trust
57:20 AI budgets, token costs and how teams are changing

-----------------------------------------------

Transcript: https://share.transistor.fm/s/d3d28b95/transcript.txt

-----------------------------------------------

Follow Jamie Lane on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamienlane/ 

Follow Jamie Lane on X:
https://x.com/jamienlane 

Follow Jawad Shreim on LinkedIn: 
linkedin.com/in/jawad-shreim 

Follow Nauman Ali on LinkedIn: 
linkedin.com/in/nali1 

Check out MilkStraw AI:
milkstraw.ai 

Check out Orbii:
orbii.ai

Follow FWDstart on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/fwdstart/ 

Follow FWDstart on TikTok:
https://www.tiktok.com/@fwdstart 

Visit our Website:
https://www.fwdstart.me/ 

Subscribe to our Newsletter:
https://www.fwdstart.me/subscribe 

Quiqup has one of the more remarkable founder stories in the region, although it didn’t start here.

Bassel El Koussa and his co-founders launched the company in London in 2014 around a simple idea: use a mobile app to let people get almost anything delivered in under an hour.

Over the years that followed, Quiqup raised tens of millions of dollars, worked with some of the world’s biggest retailers and found itself competing in one of the most aggressively funded corners of technology.

Then Uber Eats arrived in London, and the environment around the company changed remarkably quickly.

Bassel talks in the episode about going from fundraising processes that could produce term sheets within weeks to spending months on the road trying to raise capital, while increasingly confronting the reality that the business they had set out to build in the UK might no longer make sense.

What followed was a series of decisions that would eventually take Quiqup from London to Dubai and fundamentally change what the company was building.

Some were forced on them, others were very deliberate.

In 2022, Quiqup made perhaps the most counterintuitive of all, walking away from on-demand food and grocery delivery and cutting its revenue by 50% in the process.

Today, the company looks very different from the one Bassel started more than a decade ago, with Quiqup increasingly positioning itself as the infrastructure behind a new generation of e-commerce brands building across the GCC.

But the reason I enjoyed this episode so much isn’t really the logistics (although it is jam-packed full of terrific insights on this too).

The truth is most of the time there’s only so much a host can do to make a podcast conversation “good.” You can do the research, understand the company and hopefully ask the right questions, but eventually yo’re reliant on the person sitting opposite you being willing to be open about what actually happened.

Bassel was, and as a result this is honestly my favourite conversation we’ve recorded on the podcast so far.

There are very few conversations where you gradually forget that there are cameras and lights around you and end up simply shooting the breeze. This felt like one of those.

Bassel is extraordinarily candid about what it has taken to keep Quiqup alive through more than a decade of changes, including the decisions that didn’t work, the periods when the odds appeared firmly stacked against the company, and what repeatedly having to rebuild has done to him as both a founder and a leader.

At one point, we get into the period immediately after the move to Dubai, when four co-founders and two other members of the team were effectively working out of a tiny two-bedroom apartment while trying to figure out what came next.

And somehow, Bassel remembers them still joking.

There was, he says, a shared sense of duty to take the more difficult path.

“It’s gonna be a better story to tell. I’m here to tell it.”

If you're going to listen to one episode of the podcast, I think this is an excellent place to start!

We cover:

•  How Quiqup went from a London consumer delivery app to building logistics infrastructure for e-commerce brands across the GCC, and the early bets with Tesco, H&M and others that started pulling the business towards B2B 
•  What happened when Uber Eats entered London, why investor interest effectively disappeared overnight, and the extraordinarily difficult decision to shut the UK operation and rebuild from Dubai 
•  Why Quiqup deliberately walked away from on-demand food and grocery delivery in 2022, cutting revenue by 50% to focus on the long-term opportunity in e-commerce 
•  How the company is building an end-to-end logistics layer spanning fulfilment, last-mile delivery, returns and cross-border expansion, and why Bassel believes the next generation of GCC brands will increasingly want to own the customer relationship themselves 
•  How consumer expectations around delivery are changing, why beauty and wellness are pushing fastest, and what AI, autonomous delivery and more intelligent logistics infrastructure could eventually change 
•  What more than a decade of setbacks has taught Bassel about leadership, vulnerability and resilience, including why simply brute-forcing your way through adversity eventually stops working

-----------------------------------------------

00:00 Intro
01:00 How Quiqup started in London
06:00 What Uber Eats changed
10:00 Leaving London for the UAE
21:00 The 2022 reset and cutting revenue by 50%
26:00 Building the customer experience backwards
31:00 How fast can delivery actually get?
43:00 D2C, AI and the future of Quiqup
52:00 Saudi Arabia and building for regional brands
55:00 How Bassel’s leadership changed
59:00 Why resilience can’t be brute-forced
01:05:00 Rebuilding from a two-bedroom apartment

-----------------------------------------------

Transcript: https://share.transistor.fm/s/ca921c27/transcript.txt

-----------------------------------------------

Follow Jamie Lane on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamienlane/ 

Follow Jamie Lane on X:
https://x.com/jamienlane 

Follow Bassel El Koussa on LinkedIn: 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bassel-el-koussa-37576652/

Check out Quiqup:
https://www.quiqup.com/

Follow FWDstart on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/fwdstart/ 

Follow FWDstart on TikTok:
https://www.tiktok.com/@fwdstart 

Visit our Website:
https://www.fwdstart.me/ 

Subscribe to our Newsletter:
https://www.fwdstart.me/subscribe 

Bayzat has been around long enough to have lived through almost every version of the MENA startup ecosystem.

Founded in 2013, the company began with an idea for a consumer fintech product, stumbled somewhat fortuitously into SME health insurance, and gradually expanded into what is now a much broader SaaS platform spanning HR, payroll, employee benefits, talent management and, increasingly, AI-powered workflows and applications.

It's also raised more than $55 million along the way. But the journey has been anything but linear.

We sat down with the company's CEO and Co-founder Talal Bayaa for one of the more candid conversations we've had on the podcast to date.

Talal talks openly about nearly running out of money, fundraising rounds that fell apart after due diligence, the pressure that comes with having raised $55M+ and knowing investors eventually need liquidity, and the reality that, more than a decade in, he believes he is already behind on delivering that outcome.

We also get deep into how Bayzat is using AI internally and inside the product, why some software categories are far more vulnerable than others, why he is most worried about entry-level jobs, and how AI is allowing the company to build the final 10% of customer-specific functionality that traditional SaaS economics historically made prohibitively expensive.

We cover:

• How Bayzat evolved from a consumer fintech idea into a multi-product HR, payroll, benefits and SaaS platform, and why listening to customers repeatedly changed the roadmap
• How Covid pushed the company into a “death spiral”, what having effectively zero runway actually looked like, and why charging for previously free software became its most transformational decision
• The realities of raising more than $55M, fundraising rounds that fell through at the last moment, and why Talal feels a responsibility to eventually engineer liquidity for Bayzat’s shareholders
• Why Bayzat is using AI to solve the expensive final 10% of software customisation, turning work that could take months into something that can sometimes be built and deployed in hours
• Which jobs and software categories AI is likely to disrupt first, why entry-level hiring worries him most, and where Bayzat has already stripped out internal tools and headcount
• The lessons from more than a decade of building, from pricing and Saudi expansion to surviving liquidity crises, staying methodical under pressure and accepting that some problems simply take years to work through

-----------------------------------------------

Timestamps:

00:00 - What Bayzat Is Today, and Why It Refuses to Be Pigeonholed
03:00 - From Insurance Comparison Site to a Full HR Platform
05:00 - Build vs Buy, and Why Some SaaS Is in Trouble
08:00 - Using AI to Build the Last 10% of Software
11:00 - Bayzat Studio, Custom Apps, and the Pricing Problem
15:00 - The Near-Death Spiral That Forced Bayzat to Start Charging
17:00 - Expanding Into Saudi, and Why Localization Is the Moat
21:00 - How Sticky Is Bayzat, and Can AI Change That?
24:00 - M&A, Profitability, and the Pressure to Deliver Liquidity
28:00 - Raising $55M When MENA Venture Capital Barely Existed
32:00 - John Wooden, Small Teams, and Reducing Company Bloat
36:00 - AI, Entry-Level Jobs, and the Future of Hiring
41:00 - Running Out of Runway, Surviving Zero Cash, and Chipping Away at Crisis

-----------------------------------------------

Transcript: https://share.transistor.fm/s/e87fc29e/transcript.txt

-----------------------------------------------

Follow Jamie Lane on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamienlane/ 

Follow Jamie Lane on X:
https://x.com/jamienlane 

Follow Talal Bayaa on LinkedIn: 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/talal-bayaa-213ba0b/

Check out Bayzat:
https://www.bayzat.com/

Follow FWDstart on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/fwdstart/ 

Follow FWDstart on TikTok:
https://www.tiktok.com/@fwdstart 

Visit our Website:
https://www.fwdstart.me/ 

Subscribe to our Newsletter:
https://www.fwdstart.me/subscribe 

One of the luckiest things about doing this podcast is getting to sit down with people I’ve admired for years and ask them all the questions I’ve been storing up.

Rabea Ataya is very much one of those people.

As the founder of Bayt, he has spent more than 26 years building through multiple technology cycles, financial crises, geopolitical shocks and the rise of an entirely new startup ecosystem around him. 

Bayt itself survived an era in which many of its peers disappeared, became profitable and cashflow positive, and ultimately grew into something much broader than the job board it began as.

So rather than spend an hour retelling a founding story Rabea has told many times before, I wanted to do something different.

We sat down to unpack the lessons behind those 26 years: how his relationship with money and entrepreneurship has changed, why Bayt raised just $3M in outside capital, what founders misunderstand about building a cap table, how to stay hungry once you are successful, and why the playbook that made him successful in the Middle East would probably fail if someone copied it today.

We also get into some of the extraordinary businesses built under the wider Bayt umbrella, including the story of vFairs, which went from a small virtual-events experiment to growing revenue roughly 60-fold in three months during Covid, and the decision to walk away from a potentially enormous private equity deal despite the money on the table.

But what I enjoyed most about this conversation is how far beyond company-building it goes.

Rabea is remarkably thoughtful about the things that become harder to talk about as a founder gets older and more successful: whether wealth dulls your hunger, why you need people willing to tell you things you do not want to hear, how to remain present with your family, the value of journaling and deliberate thinking time, and ultimately what entrepreneurship is actually for once money stops being the primary objective.

This is a special one for me. Rabea is one of the genuine OGs of Middle East entrepreneurship, and there are very few people from whom you can draw on this depth of experience, scar tissue and perspective in a single conversation. A massive thanks to him for being so generous with all three.

We cover:

• Why founders should decide what they actually want from a company before raising money, and how the wrong cap table can quietly determine the business they are forced to build
• How Bayt survived by staying focused and profitable, why it raised just $3M, and what 26 years of building taught Rabea about sustainability versus chasing the startup playbook
• The extraordinary vFairs story, from a tiny side business to explosive Covid growth, and why Rabea ultimately walked away from a huge PE transaction
• Why wealth can make founders more conservative, the importance of staying hungry, and whether becoming successful actually makes it harder to build your next great company
• The lessons Rabea has learned about hiring for values, seeking uncomfortable feedback, protecting time to think and being genuinely present with family
• Why the old Middle East playbook of copying proven Western models is disappearing, how AI changes the equation again, and why what made Rabea successful 20 years ago could lead a founder to failure today

-----------------------------------------------

Timestamps:

00:00 - 26 Years of Entrepreneurship, and What Still Matters
 07:00 - Hustle Culture, Curiosity, and Knowing When to Monetize
 11:00 - Money, Exits, and Why Founders Need to Know What They Want
 14:00 - How Bayt Became Much More Than a Jobs Board
 17:00 - The Startup That Failed, and What It Taught Him
 20:00 - Why the Old MENA “Copy-Paste” Startup Playbook Is Dead
 23:00 - AI, Job Cuts, and the “Oh My God, My Job” Moment
 25:00 - How vFairs Went From $100K to 60x Revenue Growth
 31:00 - vFairs vs Hopin, and Walking Away From a Huge PE Deal
 34:00 - Does Becoming Wealthy Make You a Worse Founder?
 43:00 - Hiring for Values, Culture, and the AI Recruiting Revolution
 51:00 - Saudi Nationalisation, AI, and the Future of the Gulf Labour Market
 57:00 - What’s Next, When to Raise VC, and the Advice He’d Give Founders

-----------------------------------------------

Transcript: https://share.transistor.fm/s/6ffc82d8/transcript.txt

-----------------------------------------------

Follow Jamie Lane on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamienlane/ 

Follow Jamie Lane on X:
https://x.com/jamienlane 

Follow Rabea Ataya on LinkedIn: 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rabea-ataya-81320b/

Check out Bayt:
https://www.bayt.com/

Follow FWDstart on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/fwdstart/ 

Follow FWDstart on TikTok:
https://www.tiktok.com/@fwdstart 

Visit our Website:
https://www.fwdstart.me/ 

Subscribe to our Newsletter:
https://www.fwdstart.me/subscribe 

For Anis Harb, the real barrier to enterprise AI adoption is not access to better models. It is everything that sits between a promising demo and a system that actually works inside a business.

After nearly a decade at Deliveroo, where he launched and led the company’s Middle East operation, Anis left with a growing frustration: as businesses scaled, they added more headcount, which created more complexity, more process and, eventually, the need for even more headcount.

Algebra AI is his attempt to break that cycle.

The Dubai-based company emerged from stealth with $7M in funding, backed by Infinity Constellation, BECO Capital, Silicon Badia and Waseel Investments. Founded in partnership with that investor group, Algebra is targeting the more than 30,000 mid-market businesses across the GCC that sit between off-the-shelf AI software and the cost and complexity of enterprise-grade deployments.

Rather than selling businesses another piece of software or building a workflow and walking away, Algebra operates as a managed AI service. Its team works across the data layer, workflow logic, integrations, edge cases and human approvals, then stays embedded to monitor, maintain and improve the system over time.

As Anis puts it, Algebra wants to be the accountable operator, responsible not only for getting an AI system live, but for ensuring it continues to run as intended and delivers measurable business results.

The company already has engagements across financial services, food and beverage, manufacturing and distribution. While the industries may look broad, Algebra is deliberately narrow in the repeatable workflow patterns it takes on, identifying high-ROI processes that can be transformed from hours of manual work into minutes, or help businesses make decisions and take action in real time.

We also get into Anis’s unusual journey into Deliveroo, why he originally planned to build his own food-delivery company in the Middle East, how AI is changing the structure of Algebra’s own team, and what his decade inside one of the region’s most important consumer platforms taught him about localisation, growth and operational complexity.

A massive thanks again to Anis for taking the time to come on the FWDstart podcast.

We cover:

• Why enterprise AI projects so often stall after the initial pilot, and why workflow logic, data infrastructure and ongoing ownership matter more than the demo
• Algebra’s managed-service model, from identifying a high-ROI use case to staying embedded as the accountable operator responsible for its performance 
• How Anis’s decade at Deliveroo shaped his belief that companies should be able to grow without automatically adding more people, process and complexity 
• Why Algebra works across multiple industries but stays disciplined around repeatable workflow patterns rather than taking on entirely bespoke problems 
• How AI is changing team design and productivity, including Anis’s belief that five AI-native engineers can now achieve what once required 20 
• Why global AI-services playbooks cannot simply be transplanted into the GCC, where labour economics, regulation, data sovereignty and local operating behaviour require a different model

-----------------------------------------------

Timestamps:

00:00 - Why AI Adoption Breaks Inside Businesses
00:49 - Leaving Deliveroo After a Decade
04:21 - The Startup That Nearly Became Deliveroo Middle East
06:50 - Why Managed AI Services Are Booming
08:17 - Turning Hours of Manual Work Into Minutes
10:06 - What Makes a Business Ready for AI
11:50 - Why Algebra Stays Embedded After Launch
16:33 - How Do You Price Managed AI?
18:46 - Taking the Palantir Model to the Mid-Market
20:42 - Why AI Services Must Be Localised for MENA
22:19 - Building an AI-Native Company With Fewer People
31:08 - Deliveroo, Food Delivery Consolidation, and the Fight for Market Share

-----------------------------------------------

Transcript: https://share.transistor.fm/s/ed2de0dc/transcript.txt

-----------------------------------------------

Follow Jamie Lane on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamienlane/ 

Follow Jamie Lane on X:
https://x.com/jamienlane 

Follow Anis Harb on LinkedIn: 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anis-harb-54337417

Check out Algebra AI:
https://getalgebra.ai/

Follow FWDstart on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/fwdstart/ 

Follow FWDstart on TikTok:
https://www.tiktok.com/@fwdstart 

Visit our Website:
https://www.fwdstart.me/ 

Subscribe to our Newsletter:
https://www.fwdstart.me/subscribe 

For Tewfik Cassis, Lean Technologies is not an open banking company, or at least not only that.

It’s trying to become the AWS for fintech in the Middle East, an infrastructure layer so reliable, ubiquitous and necessary that payments, verified financial data, underwriting and money movement can be built on top of it without merchants stitching together five or six providers.

That ambition now stretches well beyond Lean’s original open banking shorthand.

Founded in 2019, Lean has raised more than $100M to date, giving it the backing to push deeper into Pay by Bank, Open Finance and the broader fintech infrastructure stack across the region.

We sat down with Lean CPO Tewfik Cassis on the eve of the company’s biggest product launch to date, as it prepared to roll out its Pay by Bank suite across deposits, collections, checkout and pay-by-link.

In the UAE and Saudi Arabia, Lean is building across account-to-account payments, open finance data, underwriting and money movement, while keeping one eye firmly on what comes next, from stablecoin-powered remittances to agentic commerce.

While cards are unlikely to disappear any time soon, debit card transactions, manual bank transfers and clunky direct debit experiences are all up for grabs.

And as Tewfik puts it, there’s no real reason for a customer to use debit over account-to-account payments if the experience, incentives and reliability are there.

We also get into what it actually takes to build in a regulated market, why Lean is willing to over-invest before regulation fully lands, and how the company thinks about being first to market without losing discipline.

This was a really, really fun and wide-ranging conversation, so a massive thanks again to Tewfik for taking the time to come on the FWDstart podcast.

We cover:

• Why Lean is positioning itself as the AWS for fintech in the Middle East, and why Tewfik does not see the company as just an open banking provider
• The thinking behind Lean’s biggest product launch to date, its Pay by Bank suite spanning deposits, collections, checkout and pay-by-link
• Why consumer adoption is the hard part, from Apple Pay muscle memory to the role of merchant incentives, cashback and better payment experiences
• How Lean builds ahead of regulation, makes product bets early and decides when to keep going or cut its losses
• Why stablecoins could matter so much in the GCC, particularly across remittances, cross-border payroll, trade finance and real estate
• How AI is changing the way Lean builds, hires and operates, from product management and engineering to internal tooling and SaaS spend

-----------------------------------------------

Timestamps:

00:00 - Lean’s Ambition to Become the AWS for FinTech
00:45 - What Lean Is Today
02:10 - Why Lean Is More Than Open Banking
04:00 - Pay by Bank, Debit, and the UAE Opportunity
05:00 - What Licensing Unlocks in the UAE and Saudi
07:00 - Collections, Recurring Payments, and BNPL
10:00 - Building Sticky Products for E-Commerce and Travel
13:00 - Shipping Product Before Regulation Lands
16:20 - Why Customers Would Use Pay by Bank Over Apple Pay
21:45 - Lean’s Four Pay by Bank Products
27:15 - Stablecoins, Remittances, and Cross-Border Payments
31:40 - AI, Vibe Coding, and the Future of Product Teams
44:15 - Saudi, Expansion, and What Comes Next

-----------------------------------------------

Transcript: https://share.transistor.fm/s/3558b0b6/transcript.txt

-----------------------------------------------

Follow Jamie Lane on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamienlane/ 

Follow Jamie Lane on X:
https://x.com/jamienlane 

Follow Tewfik Cassis on LinkedIn: 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tcassis/

Check out Lean:
https://leantech.me/

Follow FWDstart on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/fwdstart/ 

Follow FWDstart on TikTok:
https://www.tiktok.com/@fwdstart 

Visit our Website:
https://www.fwdstart.me/ 

Subscribe to our Newsletter:
https://www.fwdstart.me/subscribe 

In this episode, we sit down with Mohammad Al-Khalili, co-founder of ClearGrid, the AI debt-resolution company quietly rebuilding one of the least glamorous, most avoided corners of finance. 

ClearGrid came out of stealth in 2025 with $10 million across pre-seed and seed rounds, co-led by RAED Ventures, BECO Capital and Nuwa Capital, with Aramco's Waed Ventures, KBW Ventures and a string of marquee angels, Replit's Amjad Masad, Twitch's Justin Kan and Marqeta's Jason Gardner among them, also on the cap table.

ClearGrid is an outcome-as-a-service business. It doesn't sell software or seats, it gets paid when the lender gets paid, and whether the work is done by AI or humans is, in his words, its problem and not the client's. The thesis underneath it is blunt: debt is broken, the market is enormous, somewhere north of $400 billion and climbing towards the trillions, and almost no one wants to touch it.

For Khalili, it's also deeply personal. He had watched debt take its toll on people he loves, and as he puts it, there is no bigger problem worth solving in his life.

What began, deliberately, as an old-fashioned debt-collection agency, a way to learn the market from the inside before building anything, has since become a company moving towards buying the debt outright.

We cover:

– Why AI can be the more dignified debt collector rather than the harsher one, and why, as he puts it, it is not for private companies to decide who deserves empathy and who doesn't.
– The deceptively small change that moved the needle most, swapping the word "empathy" for "dignity," and why it lifted both his agents' clarity and the company's customer-satisfaction scores.
– Why he flatly refuses to call ClearGrid a voice-AI company, the race to the bottom, the collapse in pickup rates, and why voice is a channel, not a product.
– The counterintuitive north star, that like a good doctor, success means the borrower never has to come back, from a founder who came up in growth hacking and retention.
– Why better AI underwriting helps rather than threatens the business, and why debt, as old as the first written records we have, isn't going anywhere.
– The next act, buying the debt outright, and the first-principles logic of simply taking it off the lender's books.

-----------------------------------------------

Timestamps: 

00:00 - Introduction
01:00 - What ClearGrid Is, and Why Debt Is Broken
03:00 - Solving for Both the Lender and the Borrower
04:00 - From Agency, to Tools, to Outcome as a Service
06:00 - The "No Humans" Thesis, and Buying the Debt
08:00 - The First Voice AI Was a Nightmare
10:00 - Why "We Get Paid When You Get Paid"
11:00 - A Short History of Debt, and Why Collection Is Changing
15:00 - Who the Customers Are
17:00 - Why AI Is the Fairer, More Dignified Collector
19:00 - No Ego: Anger, Shame & the Hard Cases
21:00 - Command: A CRM Built for AI, Not Humans
25:00 - Why He Refuses to Build a Voice-AI Company
27:00 - AI Disclosure, and Why It Changes the Game
30:00 - Code-Switching, Arabic & Building Multilingual
33:00 - The Pivot From Empathy to Dignity
40:00 - The Anthropologist in Residence
41:00 - Is There an Existential Threat to ClearGrid?
43:00 - What Keeps Him Up at Night, and the Wrapper Trap
45:00 - "No Bigger Problem Worth Solving in My Life"
49:00 - How AI Is Changing Who Gets to Build
52:00 - 70% of the Code Is Written by AI
53:00 - What's Next: Buying the Debt & Going Global
59:00 - First Principles: Taking Debt Off the Books

-----------------------------------------------

Transcript: https://share.transistor.fm/s/f7b3053f/transcript.txt

-----------------------------------------------

Follow Jamie Lane on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamienlane/ 

Follow Jamie Lane on X:
https://x.com/jamienlane 

Follow Mohammad Al-Khalili on LinkedIn: 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mohammadalkhalili/

Check out Cleargrid:
https://www.cleargrid.co/

Follow FWDstart on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/fwdstart/ 

Follow FWDstart on TikTok:
https://www.tiktok.com/@fwdstart 

Visit our Website:
https://www.fwdstart.me/ 

Subscribe to our Newsletter:
https://www.fwdstart.me/subscribe 

-----------------------------------------------

In this episode, we sit down with Sanjar Samiev and Denis Gavrilin, co-founders of Comfi, the B2B buy-now-pay-later platform that recently raised a $65 million pre-Series A to finance the invoices the rest of the market would rather ignore.

Sanjar arrived in the UAE back in 2006, built a last-mile delivery business that exited to Amazon, then ran a manufacturing company, which is where he came face to face with the problem he's spent the last two years solving: suppliers across the region extending credit they can't really afford, waiting up to ninety days to get paid, and quietly turning into a finance department they never signed up to run.

What began as a way to finance SaaS subscriptions has since become something far broader, an AI-underwritten credit rail for the traditional trade economy, now serving more than a thousand SMEs across the UAE and Saudi.

Denis, Comfi's CFO and a former banker, takes us under the bonnet of the numbers: how a lender actually gets funded, and why a raise like this is as much about debt as it is about equity.

We cover:

– Why B2B buy-now-pay-later has almost nothing in common with the consumer version beyond the name, and why borrowing that name turned out to be an asset rather than a liability.
– Why roughly 60% of invoices in the GCC get paid late, and what that does to a supplier forced to act as their own credit and collections team.
– How Comfi underwrites a business in hours rather than weeks, with almost no human in the loop, and what that speed actually unlocks.
– Why Comfi deliberately chases the smallest cheques, the hundred-dirham invoices everyone else considers too small to bother with, and why that's the moat rather than the compromise.
– Why the banks structurally can't serve this market, and why a $120 billion financing gap has room for far more players than most people assume.
– How the $65 million raise actually works, why a lending business has to run two completely different fundraises in parallel, and how equity quietly unlocks several times its value in debt.
– Why getting in at the hundred-dirham stage is the long game, and how Comfi plans to grow with its customers as they scale.

-----------------------------------------------

Timestamps: 

00:00 - Cold Open
01:00 - What B2B BNPL Is, and Why It's Nothing Like the Consumer Kind
02:00 - Does BNPL's Bad Reputation Help or Hurt?
03:00 - The Supplier's Problem: 90-Day Terms & Late Invoices
05:00 - Starting With SaaS, Then Pivoting to Trade
06:00 - From Wingy to Amazon, to Manufacturing
10:00 - First Funding: 500 Global, Sanabil & a Family Office
12:00 - AI Underwriting in Hours, Not Weeks
14:00 - Why Banks Won't Touch This Market
15:00 - The Case for the Smallest Cheques
17:00 - Distribution: Where Comfi Finds Its Customers
23:00 - Inside the $65M Pre-Series A
26:00 - How Equity Unlocks Debt
28:00 - Competition & the $120 Billion Gap
31:00 - What Keeps Him Up at Night
35:00 - Saudi, Latam & Going Global
38:00 - The Dream: Underwriting in 15 Seconds
40:00 - Spending the Money & What's Next

-----------------------------------------------

Transcript: https://share.transistor.fm/s/a3261efc/transcript.txt

-----------------------------------------------

Follow Jamie Lane on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamienlane/ 

Follow Jamie Lane on X:
https://x.com/jamienlane 

Follow Sanjar Samiev on LinkedIn: 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjar-s-65146676/

Follow Dennis Gavrilin on LinkedIn: 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennis-gavrilin/

Check out Comfi:
https://comfi.ai/

Follow FWDstart on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/fwdstart/ 

Follow FWDstart on TikTok:
https://www.tiktok.com/@fwdstart 

Visit our Website:
https://www.fwdstart.me/ 

Subscribe to our Newsletter:
https://www.fwdstart.me/subscribe 

-----------------------------------------------

In this episode, we sit down with Deepali Nangia and Rana Abdel Latif, the partners leading Speedinvest's first dedicated Middle East and Africa fund, a flagship vehicle for the Vienna-based firm that's been quietly investing across emerging markets since 2013.

Earlier this week, Speedinvest announced the fund with anchor commitments from Mubadala (through its MENA Venture Capital Fund), the Qatar Investment Authority (via its newly expanded $3B Fund of Funds programme) and EIB Global, which took the anchor on the Africa-dedicated vehicle with a €40M commitment signed in March. 

The fund will invest across fintech, embedded finance, health, climate, AI, consumer and digital infrastructure, targeting the Series A and B capital gap that Deepali and Rana have identified across MENAPT and Sub-Saharan Africa.

The headlines make it sound like an overnight success, but as Deepali and Rana are quick to admit the reality is that this fundraise has been closer to a three-year marathon. 

Rana has been investing in the region since 2006, most recently running FinTech investments at Nclude in Cairo. Deepali joined Speedinvest to lead gender investing at the firm and has since become the driving force behind its broader emerging markets thesis, including its Micro GP programme backing female and diverse fund managers.

Deepali and Rana are honest about the ups and downs, thoughtful on where capital really needs to flow in Africa and MENA right now, and refreshingly unsparing about the tech bro renaissance that's quietly reversing a lot of DEI progress in European and American VC.

We cover:

• The real fundraising timeline behind the headlines, and why raising from sovereigns and DFIs looks a lot more like an enterprise sales cycle than anything else.
• Why Speedinvest shifted from opportunistic deals across emerging markets to a dedicated regional strategy with boots on the ground.
• The inside story of landing QIA, Mubadala and EIB, and how the sovereign narrative has shifted from "invest in our country" to "what can you bring us from outside."
• Why Series A and B is the real capital gap in Africa, and how they're thinking about complementing equity with debt, callable equity (the NICE facility with STV is the worked example) and potentially securitisation down the line.
• Where the real FinTech opportunities sit, the long tail of underserved SMEs and consumers, the rise of AI-native fintechs rebuilding the plumbing, and why embedded finance in logistics, agriculture and mobility is under-appreciated.
• How AI is changing the economics of running a VC firm, and what a flatter, leaner fund looks like as LPs start squeezing management fees.
• How Rana learned to underwrite currency risk in Egypt across multiple step devaluations, and why you can still make excellent returns if you price the 8 to 10% annual devaluation into your model.
• The tech bro renaissance, why it's quietly reversing progress right now, and what allyship from the top actually looks like in practice.

-----------------------------------------------

Timestamps: 

00:00 - Intro
00:50 - Behind the headlines of the fundraise
04:15 - Why shift from opportunistic to a dedicated regional strategy
11:20 - Inside the QIA and Mubadala deals
19:00 - Where the real capital gap sits at Series A and B
22:00 - Innovating the capital stack with STV's NICE facility
24:00 - FinTech, SMEs, and the rise of the AI-native incumbent
27:30 - Why Africa's long tail is the real opportunity
30:00 - Picks and shovels vs AI-native bets
34:00 - How AI is reshaping VC firm economics
36:30 - Pricing currency risk and lessons from Egypt
43:00 - The tech bro renaissance and women in VC

-----------------------------------------------

Transcript: https://share.transistor.fm/s/00307acd/transcript.txt

-----------------------------------------------

Follow Jamie Lane on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamienlane/

Follow Jamie Lane on X:
https://x.com/jamienlane

Follow Rana Abdel Latif on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rana-abdel-latif/

Follow Deepali Nangia on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nangianomics/

Check out Speedinvest:
https://www.speedinvest.com/

Follow FWDstart on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/fwdstart/ 

Follow FWDstart on TikTok:
https://www.tiktok.com/@fwdstart 

Visit our Website:
https://www.fwdstart.me/ 

Subscribe to our Newsletter:
https://www.fwdstart.me/subscribe 

-----------------------------------------------