In Riyadh in 2022, Saudi Arabia was licensing new financial institutions at a pace the Kingdom had not attempted before. Vision 2030's fintech targets were converting policy into paper, and paper into new institutions entering a market that had not yet built the infrastructure they would need to operate. The legacy banking systems running inside established Saudi banks required multi-year implementation cycles and transformation budgets beyond any new entrant's reach. The gap between what these institutions were about to need and what existed to serve them was, to Mohamed Oueida, a solvable engineering problem that the industry had decided to accept rather than fix. He founded Stitch in 2022 to build the answer before the customers arrived to ask for it.
The Team That Knew the Problem from Inside the Wiring
Before Stitch, the team Oueida assembled carried operational experience from the institutions that define global banking infrastructure. The founding team had spent years inside organizations including NPCI, India's national payment corporation that built the rails beneath hundreds of millions of daily transactions; FIS, one of the world's largest banking software companies; Barclays and Santander, two institutions that had operated complex multi-system architectures for decades; and Azentio, a financial technology company serving banks across the Middle East and Asia. They were not observing the problem from outside. They had been maintaining it from within.
What those years inside the systems made visible was structural. Financial institutions run their lending operations on one platform, their card programs on another, their payment processing on a third, and their general ledger on a fourth. Each platform is good at its specific function. The problem is the seams between them. Every new product launch requires engineering data transfers that the original systems were never designed to facilitate, building integration layers that the architects of each platform had always intended to be someone else's responsibility. In established banks, this fragmentation is load-bearing: it reflects decades of accumulated vendor contracts and organizational structures that no single technology decision can reverse. In a new institution entering the market for the first time, it is an optional constraint that nobody has to inherit.
Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 was constructing the conditions that would produce hundreds of new financial institutions: new fintechs, new embedded lenders, new digital banks, new payment infrastructure companies. Each of them would arrive without a legacy system to protect and without an existing vendor relationship to defend. They would need a modern stack from day one. The incumbent core banking vendors were not built for institutions of this kind: their sales cycles were measured in years, their implementation timelines in longer stretches still, and their architecture reflected the requirements of institutions that had been running for decades, not for organizations standing up their first financial product.
Oueida's reading of the moment was precise: the market he was targeting did not yet exist, but the policy framework that would create it was already in motion. He founded Stitch in 2022 to build the platform before that market materialized.
The Architecture of a Platform Nobody Needed Yet
The structural bet Stitch made was architectural before it was commercial. Rather than building a monolithic core banking replacement that would require a wholesale system migration, Oueida designed the platform as a modular stack. A unified general ledger and core database sits at the foundation. Above it, product-specific software covers lending, cards, payments, and bank accounts as discrete components that can be adopted one at a time. A customizable workflow builder sits above those, with a marketplace of integrations covering KYC, KYB, and the regulatory compliance infrastructure that every licensed institution must maintain. An institution could enter through whichever module matched its first product and expand the stack as its offering grew, without committing to a full platform replacement before it had processed a single transaction.
The modular approach reflected a considered reading of who the customer actually was. An established bank with 30 years of operational history and existing vendor relationships could not replace its core overnight regardless of the platform's quality. But a new fintech institution entering the Saudi market for the first time in 2023 or 2024 had no existing architecture to defend. It needed a foundation, not a migration. Stitch was built to be the foundation.
The seed round announced in May 2025, $10 million led by Arbor Ventures, COTU Ventures, Raed Ventures, and Saudi Venture Capital, confirmed that the architectural bet was legible to investors who had spent their careers close to the problem. The angel investors in that round carried specific credibility: Jason Gardner, who had founded Marqeta and spent a decade building card issuing infrastructure at scale, and Abdulmalik AlSheikh, who had led the construction of mada and Sadad, the payment networks that underpin Saudi Arabia's national payments system. The people who built the payment layer the Kingdom already ran on were willing to put their own capital behind the infrastructure layer it had not yet built.
The geographic bet that accompanied the Saudi focus was quiet but consequential. If the architecture worked for a Saudi fintech building its first lending product, it would work equally well for an Egyptian institution, a Kenyan microfinance provider, or an embedded lender in Southeast Asia. The fragmentation problem that Vision 2030's new institutions were inheriting was not a Saudi problem. It was a global problem that Saudi Arabia's regulatory mandate was making acute at a specific time and place. Stitch built for that specific time and place, with a platform that would travel when the moment came.
Five Billion Dollars Before the Capital Arrived
The figure that defines Stitch's compounding period is not its funding total. It is what ran through the platform before the institutional capital appeared. In the six months preceding the May 2026 Series A announcement, more than $5 billion in transactions were processed on Stitch. Customer numbers had grown tenfold in 2025. Revenue had grown twentyfold in the same period. By the time Andreessen Horowitz introduced the company to its audience, Stitch was not a well-reasoned thesis about an emerging market. It was a running system carrying real financial workloads at a scale that made the thesis redundant to argue.
The customers behind those numbers represented the breadth of the use case Oueida had targeted. Raya Financing, the consumer lending arm of Hyundai and Peugeot's Saudi operations, ran its lending infrastructure on Stitch. LuLu Exchange, one of the Gulf's largest currency exchange networks, operated on the platform. Noqodi and Foodics, companies from categories adjacent to banking that needed to embed financial products into their own offerings, were both live Stitch customers. The platform had demonstrated viability for institutions launching their first financial product alongside institutions scaling operations that had been running for several years.
When Andreessen Horowitz announced its first GCC investment in May 2026, leading a $25 million Series A that brought Stitch's total funding to $35 million, the published thesis made the AI dimension of the timing explicit. The institutions arriving in Saudi Arabia and the broader MENA region would not simply need banking software. They would need banking software that could support AI-native operations from day one. An institution whose lending data, payment records, and general ledger all live in a unified coherent system can connect that data to an AI model and receive a useful output. An institution running on three fragmented legacy platforms will spend years attempting to clean and unify data before a single AI model can run in production at any meaningful level of reliability.
Oueida's articulation of the problem carried the weight of four years of operational evidence. "Financial institutions globally run on fragmented, legacy infrastructure that should have been left behind 20 years ago," he said in the announcement. "Now every institution wants to adopt AI, but AI on top of broken infrastructure is a dead end. We built Stitch to fix that."
The geographic expansion was a consequence of the same platform logic. By the time the Series A closed, Stitch was operating across the GCC, in Egypt and Kenya, and had begun expanding into Southeast Asia. Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 had financed the proof of concept. The proof of concept had opened the rest of the market.
The Market That Policy Builds Is the Most Predictable Market a Founder Will Find
The lesson embedded in Stitch's first four years is not about fintech architecture, though the architecture is sound. It is about the specific kind of market that Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 was constructing, and what the founder who recognizes that market early enough can do with the timing advantage.
Saudi Arabia's fintech strategy set a target of 525 active fintech companies operating in the Kingdom by 2030. By the end of 2024, the count had reached 261, already exceeding the strategy's interim milestones. SAMA commenced licensing of open banking providers in March 2026, adding a new layer of regulated infrastructure to the ecosystem. These numbers are not market indicators in the conventional sense. They are policy outputs: institutions brought into existence by a regulatory framework with a published timeline and a stated objective. The demand they represent is not speculative. It is scheduled.
The founder who builds the tool that every new institution in that ecosystem will need, before those institutions arrive, occupies a position that competing after the fact cannot replicate. The bank that launched its lending product on Stitch in 2024 is not migrating to a competitor in 2027 to rebuild the same infrastructure from a standing start. The operational transition cost is Stitch's structural protection, built one customer at a time during the window that Vision 2030 opened and that no other vendor was positioned to fill.
The compounding element in the position is not the platform's capabilities. It is the live institutional data embedded in every production workload running through it. Each institution that runs its operations on Stitch is generating the transaction history, the credit behavior patterns, and the payment data that a modern financial institution will eventually want to feed to AI models. The platform that holds that data, unified and clean from day one, is the platform that turns out to be AI-ready before AI-readiness was the explicit requirement. Oueida built that before the requirement arrived, in the same way he built the platform before the institutions arrived. The move that looks prescient in retrospect was simply the decision to arrive one iteration ahead of the market it was built to serve.