MENA ecommerce is a $34 billion-plus market in 2024, with credible forecasts past $50 billion this decade — and most of it still runs on patchwork tools: Excel inventory, WhatsApp service, cash on delivery, manual returns. Platforms built elsewhere were bolted on later. The operating layer local merchants actually need has not been built yet.
Illustrative wedges we are exploring with founders, corporates, and sovereign partners. Each card is a placeholder for a deeper case study — the kind of local constraint that, if cracked, exports as global venture infrastructure.
// Trust & Payments
Curiosity: High-trust, high-ticket delivery still defaults to COD in pockets of MENA. What infrastructure makes prepaid as psychologically easy as paying at the door?
Global venture angleCracking COD conversion in Qatar unlocks the playbook for every high-AOV market still running on cash rails.
// Arabic-first Intelligence
Curiosity: Product search, reviews, and merchant feeds trained on English corpora miss intent in Arabic dialects. Who owns the discovery layer natively?
Global venture angleArabic-first commerce intelligence becomes the default acquisition channel for global brands entering MENA.
// Shared Infrastructure
Curiosity: Marketplace winners consolidated demand — millions of SMEs still ship on fragmented contracts. Can shared infrastructure make the long tail profitable?
Global venture angleA regional logistics OS is the Talabat/Careem lesson applied to B2B — network effects that compound across categories.
Three clusters per POD, each with a point of view, the numbers that made us pay attention, and the operator profile we would want in the room on day one.
AI-native commerce merchant OS / marketplace. Where the merchant runs their business and the data finally compounds.
Whoever runs the merchant's day owns the data flywheel — marketplaces are downstream of the OS.
Last updated · May 2026
Product authentication, identity, provenance — luxury, electronics, pharma. Trust as infrastructure.
Trust infrastructure flips cash to prepayment — authentication is substrate, not a feature.
Last updated · May 2026
Search, discovery, personalisation — built Arabic-first, not bolted on.
English-translated search never quite works in MENA — the team that builds Arabic-first owns discovery.
Last updated · May 2026
Shared merchant infrastructure and logistics — the rails the whole category needs.
Shared logistics rails for the long tail make every other commerce layer profitable.
Last updated · May 2026
Whoever owns the merchant's day owns the long-term relationship and the data flywheel. Marketplaces are downstream.
Orders, returns, settlement, and inventory in one place — that is where data compounds. Marketplaces rent traffic; the OS keeps the relationship.
Authentication and provenance are what turn cash on delivery into prepayment. Every point of CoD that flips improves economics for the whole stack.
Shared logistics and fulfilment built for thousands of small merchants — not only enterprise — is what makes discovery and intelligence pay back.
$34B+ market in 2024; credible path past $50B this decade.
Merchant ops on Excel and WhatsApp.
Arabic-first models finally cost-effective.
Sovereign payment rails and digital ID maturing.
10+ years domain experience
“MENA commerce still runs on broken infrastructure — every layer is an opportunity.”
Fellows bring scar tissue. Corporates bring the live problem. Co-investors help us compound the thesis before it is obvious to everyone else.
We want builders who know returns, CoD, Arabic discovery, and the chaos of long-tail inventory. Co-build means you keep the operating insight; we bring capital and distribution when the wedge is proven.
Apply as a Co-Build FellowStart with live GMV, a fulfilment constraint, or authentication at scale. If the operating layer moves, we can measure it in weeks — not in a strategy deck.
Talk to usMENA commerce is compounding faster than its infrastructure. We would rather back merchant OS and trust rails at formation than chase the next marketplace after the GMV multiple is public.
Co-invest with The StudioMENA wins when the merchant operating layer is built here — Arabic-first, AI-native, and interoperable across discovery, payments, identity, fulfilment, and trust.
Picture a shopper in Riyadh buying from a small merchant in Cairo in one tap, delivery in 24 hours, a return without a phone call, and provenance they believe. That is the bar.
We are building the layer underneath the transaction.
