Stitch Secures $25M from a16z to Fix Finance's AI Foundation

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia & DUBAI, United Arab Emirates – May 14, 2026 – Financial technology provider Stitch today announced a landmark $25 million Series A funding round led by renowned venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The investment is a significant milestone on multiple fronts: it marks a16z’s first-ever investment in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region, brings Stitch’s total funding to $35 million, and signals a major validation of the company’s mission to overhaul the antiquated infrastructure that powers global finance.

Existing investors, including Arbor Ventures, COTU Ventures, Raed Ventures, and SVC, also participated in the round, underscoring the strong continuing belief in Stitch's vision. The Riyadh-headquartered company provides a cloud-native operating system for financial institutions, aiming to solve a foundational problem that has become an existential threat in the age of artificial intelligence.

The Trillion-Dollar Infrastructure Debt

For decades, the financial industry has been running on a patchwork of legacy systems, creating what experts term 'infrastructure debt.' Despite a staggering global spend of over $1 trillion on digital transformation in the last three years and an annual technology budget of around $700 billion for banks, the core of the financial world remains fragile. Launching a new credit card or lending product can still take years, and the prospect of upgrading a core system often carries the terrifying risk of grinding all operations to a halt.

This long-standing issue has now collided with the industry's rush to adopt AI. “Financial institutions globally run on fragmented, legacy infrastructure that should have been left behind 20 years ago,” said Mohamed Oueida, founder and CEO of Stitch. “Now every institution wants to adopt AI, but AI on top of broken infrastructure is a dead end.”

His sentiment is echoed by industry analysts and investors alike. Legacy systems create isolated data silos, preventing the clean, unified, real-time data access that AI models require to function effectively. Without a reliable system of record, AI initiatives in areas like fraud detection, personalization, and risk management are doomed to underperform. Alex Rampell, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, put it bluntly: “Financial institutions are sitting on decades of infrastructure debt, and that debt is now the single biggest obstacle to AI adoption.”

A Landmark Investment Signals a New Frontier

The decision by Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley titan with over $90 billion under management, to make Stitch its inaugural investment in the GCC sends powerful shockwaves through the global venture and technology landscape. It serves as a resounding endorsement of both Stitch's technological solution and the immense, untapped potential of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region's fintech ecosystem.

The GCC fintech market, valued at over $10 billion in 2025, is on a steep growth trajectory, with projections suggesting it could triple in size to nearly $30 billion by 2032. This rapid expansion is fueled by a young, tech-savvy population, high smartphone penetration, and aggressive government-led diversification efforts like Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 and the UAE's comprehensive fintech strategy.

Saudi Arabia alone plans to establish hundreds of new financial institutions in the coming years, all of which will require modern, agile, and scalable core systems—a tailor-made market for Stitch's offering. By planting its flag with Stitch, a16z is not just backing a single company; it is making a strategic bet on the region's future as a global hub for financial innovation. “What Stitch is building — a modern, unified system of record — is what makes everything else possible,” Rampell stated. “We're excited to support them, and honored to make this our first investment in the region.”

A Modern Stack for a Modern Era

Stitch, built by a team of veterans from financial and technology giants like FIS, Barclays, and Santander, was designed specifically to dismantle this infrastructure debt. The company provides a single, cloud-native platform that unifies disparate financial functions—including lending, cards, payments, and ledgers—into one cohesive system.

Crucially, Stitch’s platform is engineered for gradual adoption. This modular approach allows a financial institution to replace its legacy components one by one, mitigating the immense risk associated with a complete “rip-and-replace” overhaul. A bank can start by modernizing its lending platform and later move on to its payment processing, all on the same underlying architecture. This de-risks the modernization journey and allows institutions to demonstrate value quickly.

This strategy is clearly resonating in the market. The company reports that in the last six months alone, over $5 billion has been transacted on its platform. It also claims a staggering 10x growth in customers and 20x growth in revenue in 2025. Marquee clients across the GCC, Africa, and Southeast Asia, such as Raya Financing (the lending arm for Hyundai and Peugeot), LuLu Exchange, Noqodi, and Foodics, have leveraged the platform to accelerate their own innovation, with some reporting product launch times that are up to 80% faster than before.

Charting the Path Forward

With $25 million in fresh capital, Stitch is poised to accelerate its growth on multiple fronts. The funds are earmarked for further product development, deepening the company's footprint across the GCC and the wider MENA region, and expanding its global go-to-market operations. The goal is to become the default operating system for financial institutions worldwide that are serious about leaving their legacy debt behind.

By providing the clean, API-driven, and unified foundation that has been missing, Stitch is not merely selling software; it is selling the ability to compete in the next era of finance. As financial institutions move from talking about AI to implementing it, the quality of their underlying infrastructure will become the primary determinant of success. With this new funding and powerful backing, Stitch is positioned to become the essential partner for institutions ready to build for that future.