Oman builds. Others benefit.

We celebrate the exit. But did we really win?
A few years back, Oman’s startup community celebrated Akeed’s acquisition by Snoonu as a landmark moment. And I understood why. Founded in 2018, Akeed built something real — 1,500 restaurant partners, 200,000 customers, deep local roots. It scheduled deliveries around prayer times, ran Arabic-speaking call centres, and proved that a homegrown Omani startup could attract regional attention. That is genuinely worth celebrating.
But the thought kept lingering.
Recently, I came across a LinkedIn post celebrating Careem’s acquisition by Uber as proof that Arab startups can win on the global stage. The comments overflowed with pride. One commenter argued they won because they sold on their own terms. I found myself pushing back — then questioning whether I was right to do so. Was selling to a foreign corporation the right outcome? Many smart people argued yes. And yet something still troubled me.
Because when I looked more carefully, I did not see a winning ecosystem. I saw a pattern. Across the Arab world, our most promising startups — the ones that solve real problems, localise brilliantly, and prove our entrepreneurs can compete — are consistently exiting before they scale. Careem was absorbed by Uber. Talabat by Delivery Hero. Their data, their technology, their growth potential — transferred out of the Arab world entirely. In innovation management, we call this ecosystem extraction — when value is created locally but captured globally.
Closer to home, Oman tells its own version of this story. Akeed was acquired by Snoonu. In 2024, Promize — an Omani data analytics company handling billions of consumer data points daily — was acquired by Saudi Arabia’s T2, celebrated at a global tech conference as a success. We built them. And each time, we called it a win.
The honest question is not whether these founders made the right personal decision. They often did. The question is whether our ecosystem gave them any other choice.
The model already exists. In the US and Israel, governments deliberately built pathways for startups to scale domestically — through public listings, patient capital and stock exchanges designed for growth-stage companies. Startups stay, scale, and contribute to GDP for decades. Saudi Arabia looked at that model, understood what the Arab world was losing, and made a deliberate choice. Today, 77 per cent of Saudi startup founders are considering an IPO, with 91 per cent favouring a domestic listing — companies built from the start with the scale and structure required for public markets. And Talabat — once absorbed by a foreign parent — listed on the Dubai Financial Market in 2024, raising $2 billion. The Arab world reclaimed it as a publicly traded company. That is what ecosystem maturity looks like. Oman has every reason to build the same pathway.
In Oman, we have incubators, hackathons, accelerator programmes, and genuine government commitment. What we do not yet have is a structured pathway from promising startup to publicly listed, locally owned, GDP-contributing company. Without that pathway, acquisition will always be the most rational exit — not because our founders lack ambition, but because the infrastructure for staying does not yet exist. What is needed is a structured innovation ecosystem — as defined under ISO 56012 — that treats startup retention as a strategic national outcome, not a byproduct of market forces.
This matters beyond economics. When a startup is acquired, its data, its algorithms, its understanding of Omani consumers — all of it moves outside our control. In a world where data is the new oil, we should think carefully about who owns the platforms that serve our people.
Vision 2040 calls for economic diversification and a knowledge-based economy. That vision cannot be built on an ecosystem that exports its best innovations before they mature. The question is no longer whether Oman can build great startups. We already have. The question is whether we are building the conditions for them to stay.
We do not just need more startups. We need startups that stay.