Product news, field notes and what we're seeing across the markets we build in, Syria's tech reopening included.
Innoveev was on Tamam's founding team and designed and built the entire product: an on-demand services marketplace, live across the UAE, with over $10M raised behind it. The market gap we spotted, the architecture we chose, and the trust problem at the heart of it.
Innoveev was on Dealio's founding team and designed and built the entire product: a buy-and-sell marketplace made for Syrian conditions, and the first marketplace in the country to bring AI into search and listings. This is the build. Thin bandwidth, Arabic first, and trust with no existing rails to lean on.
Innoveev designed, built and gifted WeSyria to the Homs governorate: one secure account that brings public services online, Arabic-first and built for an intermittent grid. This is the build, and why we gave it away.
Innoveev was on DocDoc's founding team and designed and built the entire product: a doctor-appointment app built around real-time availability, Arabic-first and low-bandwidth. It was later sold to a healthcare company in Palestine. This is the build.
Damascus: Building Digital Products in the World's Oldest Capital
Abu Dhabi: The Capital That Is Betting Its Oil Wealth on Artificial Intelligence
Aleppo: Syria's Industrial Heart, Rebuilding for a Digital Era
Sharjah: The Emirate That Built an Economy Out of Books, Factories, and Ideas
Latakia: Syria's Gateway to the Sea, Building on the Coast
Al Ain, the Garden City: Oases, Bronze-Age Tombs, and the UAE's First University
Homs: Syria's Central Crossroads, Rebuilding from the Middle
The 6G era starts in the UAE: e& launches the world's first commercial U6GHz network
The northernmost emirate pairs world-scale ceramics and quarrying with the UAE's highest mountain, the world's longest zipline, and a fast-growing company-formation business.
Famous for the great wooden waterwheels that turn on the Orontes, Hama blends agricultural heritage with a quiet, enduring character. Here is its profile, its economy, and its digital prospects.
The only emirate facing solely the Gulf of Oman, Fujairah turned its position outside the Strait of Hormuz into one of the world's great bunkering and oil-storage hubs.
The UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are each investing tens of billions in AI data centres. A snapshot of the region's build-out.
A working seaport with a Phoenician island offshore, a coastline built for tourism, and a port concession that is reconnecting Syria to Mediterranean trade.
The smallest emirate by area built one of the UAE's most affordable free zones — and turned low-cost company formation into a magnet for tens of thousands of SMEs.
Syria's eastern energy heartland sits on fertile riverbanks, with wheat and cotton on both sides of the Euphrates and a famous bridge that has long symbolised the city.
Abu Dhabi is building a ~$30 billion AI cluster with G42, OpenAI, NVIDIA and Oracle. The first 200MW phase is due in Q3 2026.
The UAE's second-smallest emirate kept its lagoons, its fishing dhows and its calm — and is now turning eco-tourism and modern fish farming into a low-key growth story.
On the banks of the Euphrates, Raqqa is an agricultural city powered by Syria's largest dam and reservoir, rebuilding around the land and water that have always defined it.
The rails are being laid — payments, connectivity, company formation. What's missing is the software on top. An open list of products we believe should exist, free for anyone to build.
An exclave of Sharjah on the Gulf of Oman, Khor Fakkan pairs the region's only natural deep-water harbour with a Roman-style amphitheatre and a 45-metre waterfall.
Capital of Syria's northeastern Jazira, Hasakah grows much of the country's wheat and cotton on the banks of the Khabur, home to a diverse community of Arabs, Kurds, Assyrians and others.
Sanctions gone, GitHub back, Visa transactions live in Damascus, and a generation of engineers reconnecting to the global economy. The case for paying attention — with the caveats stated honestly.
An inland exclave of Dubai in the Hajar Mountains, Hatta pairs a 3,000-year-old heritage village with the Arabian Peninsula's first pumped-storage hydropower plant.
The largest city of Syria's far northeast, Qamishli is a border trading centre on the Jazira plain, with busy souqs, an international airport and a mosaic of communities.
Syria's grain country and its busiest land bridge to the Gulf, wrapped around a basalt plateau that fed the Roman Empire. Here is what Daraa is, what it grows, and what it means to build digital products on the southern frontier.
Backed by the Public Investment Fund, HUMAIN is building data centres, the ALLaM model and a 6GW compute ambition.
On the black-basalt highlands of Jabal al-Arab, As-Suwayda grows the country's apples and grapes, sends its sons across the world, and remembers it was once called the city of Dionysus. A profile of Syria's mountain heartland and its digital prospects.
Wrapped in olive groves and ringed by some of the best-preserved Byzantine ruins on earth, Idlib turns fruit into trade and stone into heritage. A forward-looking profile of Syria's olive city and its digital footing.