a16z makes its first GCC bet with a $25 million round in Stitch

Published: 2026-05-14T08:35:55.000Z

Andreessen Horowitz has made its first-ever GCC investment by leading a $25 million Series A in Riyadh-based fintech Stitch. The platform processed $5 billion in transactions in six months and grew revenue twentyfold in 2025.

Andreessen Horowitz has made its first-ever investment in the GCC, and it has placed that bet on a Riyadh-based fintech that is doing something the region's financial institutions have needed for years but have rarely had access to: modern infrastructure to replace the legacy systems that still sit underneath most banking and payment operations across the Gulf and beyond. Stitch, founded in 2022 by Mohamed Oueida, has closed a $25 million Series A led by a16z, bringing its total funding to $35 million. Existing investors Arbor Ventures, COTU Ventures, Raed Ventures, and SVC all participated in the round. The choice of Stitch as a16z's GCC debut is a specific one. This is not a consumer app or a marketplace play. Stitch is infrastructure, the kind of company that sits underneath financial institutions and enables them to build and launch banking and payment products faster than legacy systems allow. The platform gives banks, fintechs, and non-financial enterprises a unified API-driven stack that replaces fragmented, outdated systems with a modern operating layer. According to the company, clients using Stitch can get financial products to market up to 80% faster than through traditional approaches, and can launch in under 90 days where the industry norm stretches far beyond that. In the past six months alone, $5 billion in transactions have been processed through the platform. Oueida's framing of the problem is direct and accurate. Financial institutions globally spent more than $1 trillion on digital transformation over the past three years, yet most still run on the same fragmented infrastructure they had decades ago. The issue is not spending. It is that legacy systems are deeply embedded, difficult to replace wholesale, and not designed to work with modern AI tools that institutions now want to build on top of them. Stitch's pitch is that AI on top of broken infrastructure produces broken AI products, and that the only way to actually modernize is to replace the underlying stack rather than layer new tools on top of old ones. That argument is resonating. In 2025, Stitch grew its customer base tenfold and increased revenue twentyfold, numbers that suggest the platform is not just being evaluated but being used at meaningful scale. The current client list includes LuLu Exchange, Noqodi, Foodics, and Raya Financing, the lending arm of Hyundai and Peugeot in the region, a mix that spans exchange houses, enterprise software platforms, and automotive financial services. Geographically, Stitch already operates across the GCC and has expanded into Africa including Egypt and Kenya, and Southeast Asia. The Series A will go toward product development and further regional and global expansion, with ambitions that go well beyond the Middle East. For a16z, the decision to enter the GCC through Stitch reflects a thesis about where emerging market financial infrastructure is heading. The firm manages more than $90 billion across its funds and has over 150 fintech investments in its portfolio globally, but until now had not made a single GCC deal. That the first one is a B2B infrastructure company rather than a consumer fintech is consistent with how a16z has historically bet on category-defining picks in markets it enters for the first time. The participation of its existing backers alongside a16z also signals continuity of investor conviction rather than a sharp pivot in strategy. For the Saudi fintech ecosystem specifically, a16z's entry through a domestically founded and Riyadh-headquartered company carries significance beyond the check size. It confirms that the tier of global investors who have historically concentrated almost entirely on Silicon Valley, London, and a handful of Asian markets are now paying direct attention to what Saudi Arabia is producing, not as a market to enter but as a source of companies worth backing at the infrastructure level. For founders building B2B fintech in the Kingdom, the signal is unambiguous.