HeyJaredFWDstart
The FWDstart Podcast is a weekly show at the intersection of venture capital, startups, and strategic industries shaping the MENA region.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 5
- Latest publication
- Sep 7, 2026
- Audience
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 6, 2026
Latest episodes
Quiqup’s Bassel El Koussa on Raising $65M, Surviving Uber and Rebuilding in Dubai (opens the original)
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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
Bayzat’s Talal Bayaa on Raising $55M, Running Out of Runway and the Pressure to Deliver an Exit (opens the original)
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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 journ
Bayt’s Rabea Ataya on 26 Years of Building and Why the Old MENA Startup Playbook No Longer Works (opens the original)
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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
Algebra AI’s Anis Harb on Raising $7M, Leaving Deliveroo After a Decade, and Why Managed AI Services Are Booming (opens the original)
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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
Lean Technologies’ Tewfik Cassis on Launching Pay by Bank, Building the AWS for Fintech, and Why Stablecoins Could Transform Payments (opens the original)
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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
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