Saudi Arabia welcomed 100 million visitors in 2025, a record that would have seemed implausible even five years ago. The infrastructure driving that number is well documented, the hotels, the giga-projects, the airline capacity. What is less visible, but increasingly important, is the layer of technology platforms enabling the human side of the experience, the guides, the local families, the community-embedded hosts who transform a visit into something genuinely memorable. Hido, the Saudi app that connects visitors with local tourism and cultural experiences, is building in exactly that space, and it has just closed a new investment round backed by the Tourism Development Fund alongside a group of local and international investors.
The round includes participation from Ben Harburg, owner of Al-Khulood Club, and Shadda Creative Studio, a combination that brings together international business credibility and Saudi creative ecosystem experience. The investment amount was not disclosed. What makes the round structurally interesting is what it signals rather than the size: a national fund established to enable the Kingdom's tourism sector is continuing to back a platform that routes economic value from tourism directly into Saudi communities rather than through large hospitality operators. The TDF's involvement is not new. It provided Hido with seed funding as far back as early 2022, meaning the fund's conviction in the platform has now persisted across multiple development stages and investment cycles.
Hido's model is built around enabling Saudi guides, families, and independent operators to package and offer tourism experiences directly to visitors. The categories span interactive cultural tours, local hospitality, outdoor adventures, and social events, a range that deliberately covers both the heritage-focused traveler and the experience-seeking tourist who wants something they could not book through a hotel concierge. The platform's value proposition to supply-side operators, meaning the guides and families offering experiences, is that it provides a digital distribution channel without requiring them to build their own. For visitors, it surfaces the kind of locally embedded experience that has become increasingly sought after as mass tourism matures and travelers begin looking for something more specific than standard itineraries.
