Rihal: Oman's SaaS Startup That Raised $7.5M and Hit 300 Staff

While much of Oman's SaaS conversation this year has centered on younger startups, one Muscat-based company has quietly built one of the region's fastest-growing enterprise software businesses: Rihal. With a $7.5 million first close on a $15 million Series A round, a 300-person team, and a client roster that includes Omantel, Bank Muscat, and Petroleum Development Oman (PDO), Rihal offers a rare look at what a mature, home-grown Omani SaaS company looks like.

🔑 Key Takeaways

• Rihal (legally Data Migration and Services LLC) was founded in Muscat around 2018 by Azzan Al Kindi, Asim Al Shabibi, and Waleed Al Harthi
• The company runs four named SaaS products: Jadawel (data collaboration), Eysal (invoice automation), Hasad (time tracking), and Iqraa (AI document extraction)
• Rihal closed $7.5 million of a targeted $15 million Series A in September 2025, led by ITHCA Group, the tech investment arm of the Oman Investment Authority
• The company has grown at a 119% compound annual growth rate since its 2021 launch phase and ranked third on Deloitte's Middle East Technology Fast 50 with 2,441% growth over four years
• Team size has passed 300, with 80% in technical roles, 90% local Omani talent, and 43% women
• Clients span government, telecom, banking, and oil and gas, positioning Rihal as an enabler of Oman's Vision 2040 digital economy goals

🚀 What Rihal Actually Does

Strip away the buzzwords and Rihal is, at its core, a company that helps large organizations stop drowning in paperwork and spreadsheets. It builds and sells four cloud-based products, according to details published on the company's own services page:

• Jadawel: a cloud collaboration and database platform where teams build custom tables, forms, and workspaces instead of relying on scattered Excel sheets, with an AI layer ("Jadawel AI") for automated analysis
• Eysal: an invoice processing tool aimed at cutting the manual, error-prone approval chains that slow down finance departments
• Hasad: a time-tracking system built for professional services firms that bill by the hour
• Iqraa: an AI-powered data extraction platform that pulls structured information out of both structured and unstructured documents, useful for organizations still buried in paper records

Around these products, Rihal also runs consulting-style service lines in Intelligent Process Automation, artificial intelligence, data management, and software engineering, which is how it built relationships with large enterprise clients before productizing what it learned into SaaS tools.

🎯 Who Rihal Serves and the Problem It Solves

Rihal's client base is heavily weighted toward institutions that generate huge volumes of documents and data: government entities, telecom operators, banks, and oil and gas majors. Public case studies and partner listings point to work with Omantel, Bank Muscat, PDO, Omran, and, through its OutSystems partner profile, seven government e-services and workflow projects.

The underlying pitch is simple: these organizations are still running on document-based, manual processes, and Rihal's job is to move them to a "data-driven mentality," as the company describes its mission on its about page. That is the same structural problem tackled by smaller local players covered previously on this site, such as the tender-digitization platform profiled in our SafaQat feature, though Rihal operates at a larger enterprise and government scale.

💰 Pricing Model

Rihal does not publish pricing for Jadawel, Eysal, Hasad, or Iqraa. Its product pages direct interested organizations to "book a free demo session" or contact the sales team directly, which is standard practice for enterprise B2B SaaS sold through direct sales cycles rather than self-serve signup. Given the client profile (government bodies, banks, and energy companies), pricing is almost certainly negotiated per contract rather than offered as a fixed monthly tier.

🛠️ Tech Stack and Technical Approach

Rihal has been a certified OutSystems partner since 2022, using the low-code platform to build web and mobile e-services applications for government clients quickly. Beyond low-code delivery, the company describes a proprietary "Rihal Data Engine with built-in automation capabilities" powering its data management practice, alongside in-house machine learning work underpinning Jadawel AI and Iqraa's document extraction models. Co-founder and CTO Waleed Al Harthi has said the company has focused on growing an in-house Omani engineering team rather than outsourcing core development, an approach that lines up with the 90% local-talent figure Rihal has publicly cited.

🏆 Rihal's USP vs. Competitors

Globally, invoice automation, document extraction, and low-code database tools are crowded categories, with competitors ranging from UiPath and Airtable-style products to large systems integrators. Rihal's edge is less about a single killer feature and more about positioning: it combines several enterprise SaaS products under one roof with deep, existing relationships inside Oman's government and energy sectors, an advantage that is difficult for foreign vendors to replicate quickly in a market where trust and Arabic-language, government-compliant delivery matter. Locally, it competes less with consumer-facing Omani SaaS startups and more with regional systems integrators and multinational enterprise software vendors trying to win the same government and oil and gas contracts.

📈 The Journey So Far

Public records place Rihal's founding around 2018, with the Oman Startup Hub listing its formal establishment in January 2019 and its entry into the Hub's programs in April 2020. The company has since grown from a niche data-migration specialist into a broader digital transformation and SaaS provider, according to ArabFounders' funding coverage.

Two milestones stand out in 2025:

• Rihal ranked third on Deloitte's Middle East Technology Fast 50 (third edition), posting 2,441% growth over four years, as reported by Oman Observer
• In September 2025, Rihal announced a $7.5 million first close of a targeted $15 million Series A round, led by ITHCA Group, the venture arm of the Oman Investment Authority, according to Wamda and The SaaS News

The company says it has posted a 119% compound annual growth rate since its 2021 seed round, a figure cited in company statements carried by Tribe Techie and Day of Dubai. Rihal's second close remains open to strategic investors as it works to complete the full $15 million target.

ITHCA Group's leadership echoed that confidence. "Rihal's performance has been nothing short of exceptional. Their ability to rapidly scale, innovate, and penetrate diverse, high-value sectors is why we are proud to lead their Series A round," said Said Al Mandhari, CEO of ITHCA Group, in comments carried by Tribe Techie. Ameer Al-Alawi, ITHCA's Director of Asset Management, added that "Rihal is one of those rare players with the right leadership, traction, and vision to scale beyond Oman and into the broader GCC."

👥 Team and Leadership

Rihal's founding team consists of three co-founders: Azzan Al Kindi (CEO), Asim Al Shabibi (COO), a former Schlumberger product and service delivery manager who managed roughly $400 million in well project execution before co-founding Rihal, and Waleed Al Harthi (CTO), who previously worked on digital projects with Shell, PDO, BP, OQ, and OLNG. Their LinkedIn profiles are public: Azzan Al Kindi, Asim Al Shabibi, and Waleed Al Harthi.

Per the company's own funding announcement, the team has grown past 300 people, with 80% in technical roles, 90% Omani nationals, and 43% women, a workforce composition that also feeds directly into Oman's Omanisation targets. Readers tracking the broader local hiring market can compare this against our recent roundup of AI and tech jobs currently open in Oman, where enterprise software roles of this kind regularly appear.

🇴🇲 Rihal and Oman's Vision 2040

Rihal's business model, helping government bodies and state-linked companies digitize document-heavy processes, sits squarely inside Vision 2040's push toward a diversified, digital-first economy. Its client list (Omantel, Bank Muscat, PDO, Omran) reads like a checklist of the institutions Vision 2040 wants to see modernized, and ITHCA Group's backing, as the investment arm of the Oman Investment Authority, signals that the state sees enterprise SaaS as a strategic sector worth funding rather than just a side story to consumer apps. A 90% Omani workforce inside a fast-scaling tech exporter is also a rare, tangible example of Omanisation and digital-economy goals reinforcing each other rather than competing.

Why this matters for Oman

Most locally covered SaaS success stories in Oman so far have been young, small teams solving a single problem. Rihal shows a different, complementary path: a seven-year-old, 300-person company graduating from IT services into a multi-product SaaS portfolio, backed by sovereign capital, and competing regionally against much larger international vendors. If its Series A closes at the full $15 million target and its GCC expansion plans hold, Rihal could become one of the clearest proof points that Oman can build, not just import, the enterprise software its government and largest companies depend on.