Alo Hakeem raises $165,000 for home care in Syria

Alo Hakeem has closed a 165,000 dollar pre-seed round led by EBLA Ventures, one year after the Syrian home-care firm was founded. The close was reported on 10 and 11 October 2026. The company said the money will go into its technology and into finishing an app for a public launch in November. Other investors were thanked and not named. No valuation and no stake were disclosed. The platform links patients to people who come to the house. Services listed include a medical visit, nursing, physiotherapy, care for older people, laboratory tests and home radiology. It currently works in Damascus, Hama and Aleppo. The plan is four more Syrian governorates by the end of 2027. The four were not named. A call centre and a website sit in front of the app that has not launched. Founders are given as Al-Baraa Abdulsalam and Abdullatif Al-Baroudi, with some reports naming only Al-Baroudi. The firm started on its own money, then joined ScaleUp 2025 and took mentoring from ChangeMakers, a Maynger Ventures programme, and from Thimar, which prepares companies for investment. Ayman Hammoush, partner and managing director at EBLA Ventures, said the bet rested on a real care need and a model that could grow. He did not publish a patient count or a fee. For a family in Aleppo or Damascus, the practical question is whether a nurse arrives. Syria’s clinics and hospitals are thin in places, and travel to them is hard for an older patient. A booking layer that sends a licensed person to the house can matter more than a new hospital wing. It also depends on the licence, the price, and whether the visit happens when the app says it will. None of those were in the round note. A November launch is a date for software. It is not a date for a visit in a fourth city. The size of the cheque sets the limit. 165,000 dollars is a first outside round, not a national rollout. Moving from three governorates to seven by the end of 2027 means hiring or contracting providers in places the company does not yet serve, and keeping them paid. EBLA led. The rest of the table is unnamed, so a reader cannot tell how much of the 165,000 is the lead cheque and how much is smaller tickets. A social-enterprise line in the company’s own post is a description. It is not a structure that was filed. Home care is also a trust market. A laboratory sample taken at home, or a physiotherapy session, needs a named professional and a record of what was done. Alo Hakeem says it uses licensed providers. It has not published how many, in which governorate, or what a visit costs. Expansion to four more governorates without those numbers is a map, not a service. A family booking a blood test does not need a funding headline. It needs the collector to arrive, the sample to reach a lab, and a result to come back. The programmes around the round are support, not capital. ScaleUp 2025, ChangeMakers and Thimar can open doors and tighten a pitch. They do not staff a night shift in Hama. EBLA’s lead is the outside money that can be named. Even that cheque, at this size, covers a small team and an app build more easily than a provider network in seven governorates. A reader in the Gulf watching Syrian startups should treat this as an early services bet, not as a software export. The customer is in Syria. The visit is in Syria. The constraint is Syrian roads, licences and cash. A further gap is the payer. The notes do not say whether a family pays the visit in cash, by transfer, or through any insurer. In a market where formal insurance is thin, the price on the booking is the whole transaction. Publishing that price, and the share that reaches the nurse, would tell a reader more than the round size. Neither number was given. If the November app opens and the company names the next governorate with a working roster, the round has a use. If 2026 ends on the same three cities, count visits completed, not governorates planned. The figure to ask for is visits done in Aleppo last month, and what the family paid.