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13 Oct 2026 · 35 minNew

Stride Ventures’ Ishpreet Singh Gandhi on $1B in Credit, Equity Dilution and Expanding to the Gulf

Ishpreet Singh Gandhi began financing startups at IDFC in India in 2015, long before venture debt had become an established part of the country’s startup ecosystem. He went on to found Stride in 2019, building a credit investment business that has since enabled more than $1 billion in financing for startups and growth-stage companies. That experience in India is now underpinning Stride’s expansion into the Gulf, with Saudi a particular focus. The firm has already led erad’s $33 million debt round , provided BRKZ with up to $30 million in growth debt , participated in Saudi-based Merit…

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Earlier episodes 24 most recent

1. 

   E24 · 6 Oct 2026 · 53 min

   COLABS’ Omar Shah on Saudi, Coworking Economics and Building Across the GCC

   Omar founded COLABS in Pakistan in 2019 after leaving a career in banking and private equity, turning an old towel factory into the company’s first location and, from there, building a network of flexible workspaces used by everyone from freelancers and startups to large multinationals. That business has since become the base for a much bigger regional ambition. COLABS has moved its headquarters to Saudi Arabia, where Omar now spends most of his time and sees the Kingdom as the biggest opportunity for the company’s next phase of growth. Getting there wasn’t straightforward. Omar spent six…

2. 

   E23 · 28 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 6 min

   How to Raise a Seed Round in MENA: MilkStraw's Jawad Shreim and Orbii's Nauman Ali on FOMO, Term Sheets and Choosing VCs

   Most startup fundraising advice tends to sound good in theory but becomes much less useful once you are actually in the middle of a round. Founders are told to build relationships, create momentum and find the right investors, but the practical details of how to do that are usually left unsaid. So for this episode, I sat down with Jawad Shreim, co-founder and CEO of MilkStraw AI, and Nauman Ali, co-founder and CEO of Orbii, two founders who have both recently been through the process themselves, to unpack how they approached it in practice. Jawad recently raised a $2 million seed round for…

3. 

   E22 · 7 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 10 min

   Quiqup’s Bassel El Koussa on Raising $65M, Surviving Uber and Rebuilding in Dubai

   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 Eats arrived in London, and the environment around the company changed remarkably quickly. Bassel…

4. 

   E21 · 25 Aug 2026 · 45 min

   Bayzat’s Talal Bayaa on Raising $55M, Running Out of Runway and the Pressure to Deliver an Exit

   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 journey has been anything but linear. We sat down with the company's CEO and Co-founder Talal Bayaa for…

5. 

   E20 · 10 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 4 min

   Bayt’s Rabea Ataya on 26 Years of Building and Why the Old MENA Startup Playbook No Longer Works

   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 cashflow positive, and ultimately grew into something much broader than the job board it began as.…

6. 

   E19 · 13 Jul 2026 · 36 min

   Algebra AI’s Anis Harb on Raising $7M, Leaving Deliveroo After a Decade, and Why Managed AI Services Are Booming

   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 to break that cycle. The Dubai-based company emerged from stealth with $7M in funding, backed by…

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