RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA & DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES -- Stitch, the operating system built for modern financial institutions, announced it has raised $25 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The investment marks a16z’s first in the GCC and brings Stitch’s total funding to $35 million. In addition to a16z, existing investors Arbor Ventures, COTU Ventures, Raed Ventures, and SVC also participated in the round.

Despite spending over $1 trillion on digital transformation in the last three years, most financial institutions are still running on the same fragmented, legacy infrastructure that has defined the sector for decades. Globally, banks spend $700 billion a year on technology — yet launching a new product still takes years, and upgrading a core system still risks bringing operations to a halt.

Now, as AI reshapes every industry, that infrastructure gap has become existential: no financial institution can meaningfully adopt AI without first having a clean, reliable system of record to build on.

Built by operators who spent years at NPCI, FIS, Barclays, Santander, and Azentio, Stitch was designed to lay that foundation. The platform gives financial institutions a single, cloud-native stack spanning lending, cards, payments, and ledgers — one they can adopt gradually, module by module, without ripping out existing systems overnight. By replacing the fragmented core with a modern system of record, Stitch unlocks the AI transformation that institutions have been promised but cannot reach without the right infrastructure.

“Financial institutions globally run on fragmented, legacy infrastructure that should have been left behind 20 years ago. Now every institution wants to adopt AI, but AI on top of broken infrastructure is a dead end,” said Mohamed Oueida, founder and CEO of Stitch. “We built Stitch to fix that, and we’re proud to have Andreessen Horowitz alongside us.”

In the last six months alone, more than $5 billion has been transacted on the Stitch platform. Customer numbers grew 10x in 2025, and revenue grew 20x in the same period.

Stitch currently operates across the GCC, Africa — including Egypt and Kenya — and Southeast Asia, with customers including Raya Financing (the lending arm of Hyundai and Peugeot), LuLu Exchange, Noqodi, and Foodics. The company plans to continue expanding with the goal of servicing financial institutions worldwide.

“Financial institutions are sitting on decades of infrastructure debt, and that debt is now the single biggest obstacle to AI adoption. What Stitch is building — a modern, unified system of record — is what makes everything else possible. We’re excited to support them, and honored to make this our first investment in the region,” said Alex Rampell, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

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.