The ZabonEx Story: Two Omantel Colleagues Turned SaaS Founders

Before ZabonEx became one of Oman's more talked-about B2B SaaS startups, its two founders were simply colleagues sharing a department at Omantel. Their journey from telecom back-office roles to running a predictive analytics platform for the food and beverage sector is a quiet but instructive case study in how Omani tech founders are turning day-job frustrations into homegrown software.

🔑 Key Takeaways

• Hatim Moosa Al Abri and Almuhannad Al Balushi co-founded ZabonEx in 2023 after roughly five years working together in the same department at Omantel.
• ZabonEx is a Muscat-based B2B SaaS platform that gives food and beverage producers, distributors and retailers customer-level demand forecasts to cut waste and protect margins.
• The startup closed a $100,000 pre-seed round in July 2025 led by Future Fund Oman and ITHCA Group.
• Hatim was named "Innovator of the Year in Predictive Analytics (F&B)" in 2025, and ZabonEx won Best Newcomer at the 2023 Middle East Startup Awards.
• The company is targeting expansion into Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Bahrain after consolidating its base in Oman.

🥛 From Telecom Desks to Startup Founders

Hatim Moosa Al Abri and Almuhannad Al Balushi did not meet in a startup accelerator or a university hackathon. According to an Entrepreneur Mirror interview with the pair, both bring backgrounds spanning ICT and R&D roles, and both spent time working internationally before returning to Oman: Hatim studied and worked in New Zealand, including a stint at Datacom, while Almuhannad worked on data automation projects at DairyNZ, according to his professional profile. That dairy-industry data experience turned out to be unusually relevant preparation for a food-forecasting startup.

The two later found themselves working together in the same department at Omantel, Oman's largest telecom operator, for around five years. That shared office time, spent on ICT and business systems projects, is where the idea for ZabonEx took shape. Almuhannad currently continues to serve as a Senior Expert in Business Systems Support at Omantel while acting as ZabonEx's co-founder and CTO.

📊 What ZabonEx Actually Does

ZabonEx is a B2B SaaS platform built to solve a very specific, very costly problem: food and beverage businesses routinely over-order or under-order stock because they are forecasting demand with spreadsheets and gut instinct. The platform connects to a business's sales and inventory data and generates real-time, customer-level demand predictions, then turns those predictions into concrete ordering recommendations, according to Oman Observer.

"F&B businesses are under pressure to stay profitable while meeting sustainability expectations. ZabonEx was born from this challenge," Almuhannad explained, as reported by Wamda. The pitch is straightforward: reduce spoilage and waste for producers, distributors and retailers while helping them sell more of what customers actually want, when they want it.

The company is headquartered in Bawshar and had grown to roughly nine employees as of mid-2025, per company data cited by industry trackers. It is one of a small but growing cluster of Omani founders building vertical SaaS tools for unglamorous but essential industries; the same pattern shows up in SafaQat, the family-run SaaS startup digitizing Oman's tender process, another example of local founders picking a narrow, painful workflow and building software specifically for it rather than chasing a broader consumer app.

💰 Funding and Growth Trajectory

ZabonEx closed a $100,000 pre-seed round on July 21, 2025, led by Future Fund Oman with participation from ITHCA Group, according to Wamda's reporting. The round was later covered again as the company detailed its regional ambitions, with Oman Observer noting the funds would go toward enhancing the prediction engine, growing the technical team, and building bilingual, locally-compliant versions of the product ahead of a push into Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Bahrain.

Coverage of the raise also appeared on The SaaS News, which framed the round as part of a broader push by ZabonEx to build a specialized onboarding toolkit for Oman's food supply chain before scaling regionally. The strategy is deliberately sequenced: prove the model at home first, then export it.

🏆 Recognition and Ecosystem Role

The recognition has followed the funding. ZabonEx won Best Newcomer at the Middle East Startup Awards in 2023, and the company's founders were sponsored by Oman's Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology to attend Web Summit Qatar and LEAP in Riyadh, according to the Entrepreneur Mirror profile of the founders. Hatim was separately named "Innovator of the Year in Predictive Analytics (F&B)" in 2025 by a global business awards program, a recognition of the underlying forecasting technology rather than just the business story.

Both founders also credit Omantel Innovation Labs with providing early support and a nurturing environment as they moved from an internal idea to an independent company, a reminder that Oman's incumbent operators are increasingly playing a quiet role as informal incubators for the startups their own employees eventually spin out.

🇴🇲 Philosophy on Building in Oman

ZabonEx's founders have been consistent in framing their company as an Oman-first bet rather than a story that only makes sense once it leaves the country. Their public comments emphasize proving the model domestically, in Oman's own F&B ecosystem, before touching a second market. That is a deliberately conservative approach in a region where founders often talk regional expansion before local product-market fit is settled.

It is also a philosophy shared by other homegrown SaaS teams profiled on this site, including the founders behind eMushrif's smart-transport software, who similarly built for a specific domestic operational problem before pursuing outside partnerships. For ZabonEx, that problem is food waste and the razor-thin margins that come with getting F&B inventory decisions wrong.

💡 Why This Matters for Oman

ZabonEx is a useful data point for Oman's Vision 2040 ambitions around economic diversification and a knowledge-based economy: it is a homegrown SaaS company, not a subsidiary of a foreign platform, tackling a real operational cost problem in the food sector using data science built by Omani engineers. The company's path, from two colleagues inside a state-linked telecom operator to independent founders backed by Future Fund Oman and ITHCA Group, also illustrates a maturing local funding pipeline that did not exist in the same form even a few years ago. As more of Oman's larger employers indirectly seed their own startup competitors through alumni like Hatim and Almuhannad, the Sultanate's private-sector tech base stands to grow a little less dependent on any single anchor employer.