AI in Oman

In March 2016, a computer engineering graduate who had spent over a decade working in Oman's oil sector registered a company called Thawani Technologies. There were no headline funding rounds, no Silicon Valley backers, and no glossy press release. A decade later, Thawani Pay sits on the Forbes Middle East Fintech 50 list, holds a Visa credit card license, and stands as the only Omani company to have done both. Behind it all is Majid Al Amri: engineer, oil-industry veteran, and the quiet architect of Oman's most consequential fintech story.

🎓 From SQU Campus to the Oilfields

Al Amri graduated from Sultan Qaboos University in 2003 with a degree in Computer Engineering. He then took a path that might seem counterintuitive for a tech graduate: a long stint in Oman's energy sector, working with both PDO (Petroleum Development Oman) and Schlumberger across roles in sales, business development, finance, and accounts management.

Those years were formative in ways that a startup accelerator cannot replicate. Working inside Oman's largest industrial institutions gave Al Amri a ground-level understanding of how money moves in the Omani economy: how large enterprises manage vendor payments, how procurement decisions get made, and, critically, where the friction is. He also volunteered as an SME adviser at Al Zubair SEC, which brought him into direct contact with the smaller end of the market and the structural gaps that small Omani businesses face every day.

💡 The Fintech Pivot

By 2016, Al Amri had seen enough to know that Oman's payment infrastructure was leaving both consumers and businesses behind. The kingdom lacked a homegrown digital payments platform built for local needs: Arabic-language UX, Omani banking partnerships, and compliance designed around Central Bank of Oman rules from the ground up rather than grafted on afterward.

He founded Thawani Technologies LLC in March 2016 and launched the payment platform publicly in 2017. The company did not announce a venture round or enter a high-profile accelerator. It built quietly and applied for the licenses that mattered.

One of those milestones set the stage for everything that followed: Thawani became the first financial technology firm in Oman to receive a payment services license from the Central Bank of Oman, according to the company's own disclosures. This was not just a legal formality. It gave Thawani a regulatory head start over any international fintech looking to enter the Omani market.

💳 What Thawani Does

Thawani Pay is an e-payment platform that connects consumers, merchants, banks, and institutions under a single infrastructure. The product enables digital transactions across retail, e-commerce, and institutional payments. Unlike global fintech platforms that treat Oman as a secondary market, Thawani was designed for it from day one.

Sultan Qaboos University formalized this local trust by signing a campus payment cooperation agreement with Thawani, making the platform part of everyday university life for SQU students and staff.

📊 Forbes Fintech 50: Two Consecutive Rankings

In 2024, Thawani ranked 40th on the Forbes Middle East Fintech 50, making it the only Omani company on the list. The following year, as Muscat Daily reported, Thawani climbed to 36th, a four-place improvement that signaled momentum rather than a one-off inclusion.

For context, the Forbes Fintech 50 in the Middle East is dominated by UAE and Saudi companies. An Oman-based fintech appearing twice in a row, and climbing the rankings each time, is a notable achievement in a competitive field.

🏆 Oman's First Visa-Licensed Fintech

The milestone that marks Thawani's clearest leap came in 2025. The company secured a Visa license to issue credit cards, as Times of Oman covered at the time, making it the first Omani fintech to hold this license.

Securing a Visa issuing license requires meeting Visa's global compliance standards, demonstrating capital adequacy, and obtaining regulatory approval from the Central Bank of Oman. For a company built organically from Muscat over nine years, without the typical venture capital runway of its regional peers, this is a hard-won milestone that opens the door to a full consumer credit product.

⚖️ Shaping the Rules, Not Just Following Them

What distinguishes Al Amri's journey is not just that Thawani complied with Oman's fintech regulations. The company helped write them. Thawani was involved in shaping the regulatory legislation that now governs fintech in the Sultanate, positioning it not as a rule-follower but as a participant in building the framework that others now operate under.

This kind of regulatory influence is rare for a founder-led company in any market. In Oman, where the government plays an active role in shaping the digital economy under Vision 2040, it gives Thawani a structural relationship with policy that most startups never develop.

🌱 Part of a Broader Oman Founder Story

Al Amri's trajectory sits alongside a growing cohort of Omani founders who built products for local markets and earned regional recognition by doing so. Thawani's fintech story echoes in different sectors: in F&B, Fascano recently raised $10M for its restaurant SaaS, built on the same premise that local market knowledge beats imported platforms. What unites these stories is patient, market-grounded building rather than growth-at-all-costs playbooks.

🇴🇲 Why This Matters for Oman

Oman Vision 2040 places financial technology among the priority sectors for economic diversification. A homegrown fintech that holds a Forbes Fintech 50 ranking and a Visa credit card license is exactly the proof point the Vision needs: that Omani founders, working from Muscat, can build products that earn international recognition without replicating foreign startup blueprints.

As Oman's AI Special Zone takes shape and the startup funding environment matures, Al Amri's decade-long journey from SQU engineering graduate to fintech pioneer offers a clear template for what patient, compliance-first, market-focused building looks like in the Sultanate. The Thawani story is still being written. But the foundation is solid.

Two pieces of news this week put Oman's cybersecurity sector in sharp focus. On 13 June 2026, Oman graduated its first cohort of 30 national cybersecurity leaders from a two-year programme backed by the Oman Investment Authority, OTC, and PwC Middle East. The very next morning, new market data confirmed the landscape those graduates are entering: a domestic sector projected to grow from $135 million today to $214 million by 2031.

🔑 Key Takeaways

• 30 Omani cybersecurity specialists graduated on 13 June, with the programme targeting 100 national leaders across multiple cohorts.
• The domestic market is set to hit $214M by 2031, growing at 7.97% annually from a $135M base in 2025.
• Local cybersecurity companies tripled from 16 to 48 since 2020, with 17 locally developed products now in market.
• 18 universities in Oman now offer cybersecurity degrees, with nearly 2,000 trained job seekers in the pipeline.
• Oman now ranks among the ITU Global Cybersecurity Index top tier, validating five years of systematic investment.

🎓 Thirty Leaders, Two Years in the Making

The National Cybersecurity Leadership Programme is not a short course. According to Oman Observer, the initiative runs for two years and combines executive education, realistic cyber crisis simulations, peer collaboration, and direct engagement with senior leadership across government and the private sector.

The programme was developed through a partnership of the Oman Investment Authority, OTC, and PwC Middle East. Its first cohort of 30 specialists was drawn from government entities and organisations operating critical national infrastructure. The stated goal is to develop 100 national cybersecurity professionals in total, meaning at least two more cohorts will follow this graduation.

The programme fills a specific gap: not a shortage of technical skills, but a deficit of senior leaders who can manage cybersecurity at the organisational and national level. Crisis simulation, decision-making under pressure, and board-level communication are core elements. In practice, Oman now has 30 more professionals who can lead an incident response and brief a minister in the same 24 hours.

📈 The Market Behind the Milestone

The same week as the graduation, the Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology and Invest Oman released a detailed market analysis. As Oman Observer reported on 14 June, the domestic cybersecurity sector is projected to grow from $135.33 million in 2025 to $146.12 million in 2026, and reach $214.27 million by 2031. That is a compound annual growth rate of 7.97% over five years.

For context, the global cybersecurity market is expected to expand from $301.91 billion in 2025 to $878.48 billion by 2034. Oman's measured growth trajectory reflects a market transitioning from government-led procurement toward a phase where private-sector demand, locally developed products, and regional exports begin to diversify the revenue base.

🏗️ An Ecosystem That Quietly Tripled

The headline figures mask a more striking structural shift. In 2020, Oman had 16 registered cybersecurity companies. By 2025 that number had grown to 48: a threefold increase in five years. The total ecosystem now spans 56 providers, comprising 34 local firms and 22 global players. The number of accredited providers grew from 4 in 2021 to 11 in 2025, and 17 locally developed cybersecurity products are now in the market.

Three Omani companies have earned international accreditation, opening the door to regional exports. This is the signal that matters most for long-term growth: a country that only buys cybersecurity products from abroad will always be a cost centre. A country with internationally certified local products can become a revenue source.

The Ministry's Hadatha Cybersecurity Industry Programme has been a primary driver of this growth. According to the market report, Hadatha reached 13,000 beneficiaries between 2021 and 2025, combining training, startup incubation, sectoral hackathons, and CREST certification pathways for Omani firms seeking internationally recognised penetration testing credentials.

👩‍💻 Building the Talent Pipeline

The market report counts 18 academic institutions in Oman now offering cybersecurity degrees or majors, with 445 students currently enrolled. The broader talent pool includes 1,870 registered job seekers with cybersecurity backgrounds: a figure reflecting both the field's growing appeal and the government's active effort to track and connect talent with employers.

These numbers point to a pipeline that is functional but not yet sufficient for projected demand. At current enrollment rates, Oman will need to roughly double its annual graduation output to fill the roles a $214M market will require by 2031. The National Cybersecurity Leadership Programme addresses the top of that talent stack, complementing the undergraduate and bootcamp pipeline at the base.

For Omani graduates and professionals considering cybersecurity, the timing is favourable. As covered earlier this month, the Sas for Excellence initiative extended RO 1 million in direct financing to qualifying Omani tech firms in AI and cybersecurity, alongside procurement priority with government entities and SOEs. Combined with salary data showing cybersecurity as one of Oman's highest-compensated technology specialisations, the case for entering the field is clear.

🇴🇲 The Vision 2040 Angle

Cybersecurity sits at the intersection of almost every pillar of Vision 2040. The digital economy cannot scale without trusted infrastructure. E-government services depend on secure data handling. The AI Special Zone in Muscat, the national cloud platform, and the 23,000-user government AI system all require robust cyber defence. The shift from oil-dependent revenues toward a knowledge economy rests on Oman's ability to protect its data assets and those of businesses operating here.

According to the 14 June market analysis, Oman now ranks among the top-tier countries in the International Telecommunication Union's Global Cybersecurity Index, a position that reflects five years of systematic work through Hadatha, the National Digital Economy Programme, and the 2026-2030 roadmap. Oxford Insights ranked Oman 45th out of 193 countries in its 2024 Government AI Readiness Index, up five spots from the prior year.

Whether this positions Oman as a cybersecurity exporter, not merely a buyer, remains a medium-term ambition. With three internationally accredited local companies and an active CREST certification track, the trajectory is credible. That question is central to whether Vision 2040's broader regional ambitions move beyond announcements, as omanvision2040.com examined in April 2026.

🎯 Why This Matters for Oman

Cybersecurity is often treated as a cost centre. The data released this week reframes it as an industry. A $214 million market by 2031 means procurement budgets, local employment, export potential, and a reason for global vendors to establish Omani presences. The 48 local companies that exist today are the foundation for a sector that could become a meaningful contributor to non-oil GDP.

The graduation of 30 senior cybersecurity leaders is a quieter milestone than a ribbon-cutting on a data centre, but arguably more durable. Infrastructure can be outsourced. Leadership expertise is harder to import. By investing simultaneously in the pipeline at the base and senior talent at the top, Oman is building the kind of self-sustaining capacity that Vision 2040 requires, not just the kind that looks good in a press release.

For startups and investors watching the sector, the clearest signal is in the ecosystem data: local firms tripling in five years, international accreditations climbing, and government procurement now weighted toward Omani suppliers. That is a market structure that rewards early positioning.