Author: Matthew Kayser

Advice for MENA founders from Arclight Capital’s Akash Bhojwani: the region’s biggest openings are in the regulated infrastructure nobody wants to build. Every pitch deck in the region seems to promise a super-app. Akash Bhojwani has a different suggestion for founders: build the layer underneath instead. “Everyone wants to build the interface. Almost nobody wants to build the boring layer, the payments, the identity, the claims settlement,” says Bhojwani, Founder and Managing Director of Arclight Capital, a Dubai-based holding and advisory firm operating across the UAE-India corridor. “But the compounding happens in the plumbing. Owning a regulated layer is the…

A U.S. company can enter Saudi Arabia, establish a base in Dubai, and later expand into Bahrain as part of one regional growth strategy, yet the documents supporting those moves may follow different legal paths in each country. The commercial logic may be regional, but the legal recognition of corporate and personal records still happens jurisdiction by jurisdiction. That difference often becomes visible only after the larger expansion decisions have already been made. A company may know where it wants to operate and how it plans to structure the business, then discover that the records supporting those plans need to…

In 2019, most businesses in the Gulf were still treating mobile apps as digital brochures. They were static, functional, and built to check a box. Nobody was seriously asking whether an app could learn from its users, adapt on its own, or get smarter over time. That was a problem for later. Techlancers Middle East, a software development and digital transformation company that set up shop inside Dubai’s Design District that same year, thought later was going to arrive sooner than most people expected. In 2026, it has and the company; which has quietly served over 500 businesses across the…