Is the Middle East the Next India or China for Startups?

The question is no longer whether the Middle East can produce viable, valuable startups, but whether it can sustain them long enough to rewrite the region’s economic story.

For decades, the Middle East has been seen only through the lens of oil and conflict. The notion that it could become a hub of entrepreneurship was dismissed as wishful thinking. Startups are born in Silicon Valley or Shenzhen, not in Baghdad, Beirut, or Cairo. But that story is shifting. A new book by venture capitalist Noor Sweid, Coming of Age: How Technology and Entrepreneurship are Changing the Face of MENA, argues that the region is at an inflection point. Against every expectation, a generation of founders is building companies that matter.

I have seen this firsthand. In Iraq and Lebanon, I witnessed young people with limited resources but unlimited determination finding ways to launch businesses in environments that outsiders would consider uninvestable. Through microgrant business accelerator programs, I saw ideas that began as survival strategies turn into scalable solutions. What struck me most was not just the ingenuity but the perseverance to build something meaningful in an often corrupt and hostile regulatory environment. Rather than mimic Western models, they built solutions tailored to crises only they faced.

The conditions could hardly be harsher. Infrastructure is unreliable, capital is scarce, and politics are unstable. By conventional measures, this should be the last place on earth to attempt a startup. And yet those very weaknesses have produced what Sweid calls the “Adversity Advantage.” Unlike California founders who build with abundant capital and global infrastructure at their backs, Middle Eastern entrepreneurs build in scarcity. They solve for survival and forgo luxuries. Fintech emerges because most people are unbanked. Healthtech thrives because hospitals fail. Agritech advances because water is running out. They are designed to meet urgent needs, not to entertain the wealthy. And in many ways, they are more relevant to the Global South than anything Silicon Valley has ever produced.

Sweid makes a bold claim: the Middle East today is where China was in the 1990s and India in the 2000s. Careem, Souq, and Kitopi, the region’s first unicorns, have proven that billion-dollar outcomes are possible. Their alumni are seeding a second wave of founders, just as the PayPal mafia once did in Silicon Valley. Gulf governments, for all their flaws, are competing to turn Dubai, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi into global startup hubs, and the building momentum is tangible on the ground.

Progress alone will not guarantee long-term success, and the challenges are evident. Political fragmentation across 22 countries means no unified market, with founders navigating bureaucracies that suffocate growth. Gulf sovereign wealth funds dominate investment, and their priorities can shift overnight. Education systems across much of the region remain weak and incapable of producing the volume of technical talent needed. This is not China with its central planning and scale, nor India with its vast English-speaking workforce. It is a patchwork stitched together by necessity more than design. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t formidable.

That patchwork might be the region’s advantage. Adversity breeds determination among a younger generation who can envision a better future for themselves and their families. Founders who build in chaos naturally develop a tenacity that others cannot replicate. Companies that thrive under scarcity become leaner, tougher, and more adaptable.

The stakes are more complex than just simple economics. A thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem can give the region a future that the everyday citizen is responsible for, rather than a narrative not written by dictators, militias, or oil ministers. It can offer young people, who make up two-thirds of the population, a reason to stay, to build, and to imagine themselves not just as consumers of someone else’s innovation but as producers of their own. That shift in imagination may matter as much as the technology itself.

So do startups in the Middle East have a future? Yes, but not one that looks like Silicon Valley. The region is building something different, born out of youth, necessity, and stubborn resolve. If the momentum continues, we may look back on this decade as the moment the Middle East stopped being written off as a consumer market and started being recognized as a global producer of innovation. That possibility is not far-fetched. It is already underway.

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