Stitch

Stitch is a unified platform that gives banks, lenders, and fintechs a single system of record for ledgers, transactions, deposits, cards, loans, and onboarding, replacing the patchwork of vendor integrations that financial institutions typically stitch together to launch products. Founded in 2022 by Mohamed Oueida, the Riyadh-based company develops a cloud-native operating system for financial institutions covering lending, cards, payments, and ledgers. The pitch to founders and operators is straightforward, namely that legacy core systems make modern product cycles slow and make any serious AI adoption impractical until the underlying data layer is clean. The launch matters because Stitch just closed a $25 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, which marks a16z's first investment in the GCC , with continued participation from Arbor, COTU, Raed, and SVC. Customer numbers grew 10x in 2025, and revenue grew 20x in the same period , and in the last six months alone, more than $5 billion has been transacted on the Stitch platform. a16z general partner Alex Rampell is backing the thesis that decades of infrastructure debt at banks is now the main blocker to AI adoption. The company operates across the GCC, Africa, and Southeast Asia, with customers including Raya Financing (the lending arm of Hyundai and Peugeot), LuLu Exchange, Noqodi, and Foodics . The fresh capital will go toward accelerating product development, deepening Stitch's presence across the GCC and broader MENA region, and expanding its global go-to-market operations. For investors and operators watching infrastructure plays in emerging markets, this is one of the clearer signals that core banking modernization is becoming an AI story rather than a pure fintech one.