Stitch raises a $25M Series A led by a16z, the firm's first GCC investment

RIYADH — Stitch has raised a $25M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Arbor Ventures, COTU Ventures, Raed Ventures and SVC participating. The company’s release says the round takes total funding to $35M and describes the deal as a16z’s first investment in the GCC. Led by CEO Mohamed Oueida, Stitch sells a cloud-native operating system for banks and lenders, with customers including Raya Financing, LuLu Exchange, Noqodi and Foodics.

The mercury just hit fifty, by editor’s flag rather than by size. A $25M equity round reads 40° on the rubric; a tier-one US venture firm writing its first lead cheque into a Saudi-headquartered company is the kind of event the alert exists for.

What it prices in: the whole ecosystem will cite this round for years, because it answers the question every Gulf founder gets in San Francisco. The core-banking layer is also the right place for it to happen: banks and lenders across the Kingdom are being rebuilt on new licences, and someone sells them the software.

Who wins: Stitch, obviously; and every Saudi Series A founder who now has a precedent to point at. Will it work? Core-banking migrations are slow and sticky. Slow is fine when the customer never leaves.

Source: Company release