Syria

Our Damascus engineers spent years contributing to global software from accounts that couldn't hold a private repository or receive a payment. That changed in 2025: GitHub restored full access, US and EU sanctions were lifted, and the first Visa and Mastercard transactions in over fifteen years ran in Damascus. We've documented every step of that reopening on our blog — not as cheerleaders, but as people building here.

Building in Syria shaped how we engineer everything. Intermittent power and thin bandwidth taught us offline-first architecture and strict payload budgets. A bilingual society taught us to design Arabic-first, not Arabic-also. The constraints made us better — and the products we test in a Damascus basement work anywhere.

For over a decade Syria's tech sector was locked out of the global economy. That reversed fast: through 2025 the US and EU lifted sanctions, GitHub restored full access, and in 2026 the first Visa and Mastercard transactions in fifteen years ran in Damascus. The government launched a National Startup Agenda and abolished prior licensing for apps — you can register and ship.

The fundamentals are early-stage but real: internet penetration around a third of the population, a billion-dollar mobile-network tender underway, new submarine cables landing, and a large, senior diaspora reconnecting. It's a genuine greenfield — high friction on banking and infrastructure, but the kind of asymmetric opportunity that only exists at the very start of a market reopening.