How to use this
A map of who's building the Gulf
Most startup directories give you a list of names. This one is built as a graph: every startup connects to the people who founded it, the investors who funded it, the program it came out of, the company that bought it, and the building it sits in. You can walk it from any direction.
Four ways in
Pick whichever matches the question you actually have.
- The directory
- Start here if you know roughly what you're looking for. 313 startups, filterable by sector, funding stage and whether they're hiring. Each row opens a profile with founders, funding history, sectors and sources.
- The map
- Start here if the question is geographic — where a scene clusters, who your neighbours would be, which tower to walk into. 77 startups are placed at their real street address. Markers with a number are buildings holding more than one company; click to see the tenants.
- The people
- Start here if you're tracking humans rather than logos. 258 founders and operators, each linked to everything they've built. This is the view that shows you where a company's team came from — and where its alumni went next.
- The money
- Start here if you want to know who backs what. 140 funding rounds with lead investors and participants; open any investor to see their whole portfolio in one place.
Where the numbers come from
Every valuation, round size and exit carries a citation. Where you see a small gold number next to a figure, click it — you get the publication, the date and the passage the figure came from. There are 546 of them.
This matters more in the Gulf than it would elsewhere. Regional funding data is thin, often paywalled, and frequently repeated between outlets without anyone checking the original. Rather than launder that into confident-looking numbers, this shows its work.
Gaps are marked rather than filled. When a deal price was never published, it says undisclosed, not zero and not a guess. Addresses come from public registers — the DFSA and DIFC filings, company contact pages, and the registered addresses on terms and privacy pages. Roughly two thirds of startups publish no street address at all, which is why the map holds fewer pins than the directory holds rows.
Why this ecosystem is worth watching
Dubai holds around 86% of all startups in the UAE, and its ecosystem ranks roughly 372% stronger than Abu Dhabi's on global measures. For a city of this size that concentration is unusual — it means the scene is small enough to actually know, and dense enough to matter.
It is also a genuine exit market, not just a launchpad. Uber bought Careem for $3.1 billion. Delivery Hero took InstaShop for $360 million. Those exits recycle: the operators who built the first generation are funding and founding the second, and that lineage is visible here in a way it isn't anywhere else.
And it is under-covered. The global platforms — Crunchbase, PitchBook, Dealroom, Tracxn — barely market coverage of this region at all. What regional data exists tends to sit behind enterprise pricing aimed at funds and governments, not at the founders and operators who are actually in it. That gap is the reason this exists.
Scope, honestly
The name says Gulf; the data is Dubai-deep today, with a handful of Abu Dhabi and Ras Al Khaimah companies alongside it. That's deliberate — depth in one city is more useful than a thin layer across six countries, and Dubai is where the density is. Riyadh and Abu Dhabi are the obvious next rooms.
If something here is wrong about your company, it's wrong because a public source said so. Point at it and it gets fixed.