Saudi Arabia's fintech sector is attracting major Silicon Valley investors, signalling the market has matured from emerging opportunity to proven growth story. Andreessen Horowitz recently invested $25 million in Saudi startup Stitch, marking its first GCC deal, whilst General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital and PayPal Ventures have backed other Saudi fintechs. Digital payments now account for 79% of retail transactions in Saudi Arabia, with licensed fintech firms jumping from 80 in 2022 to over 280 by mid-2025. The sector is valued at $2.85 billion in 2025 and forecast to reach $5.28 billion by 2030. International investors now represent over half of Saudi venture capital participants, up from under a fifth in 2020. Experts say the real opportunity lies in infrastructure rather than consumer apps, with open banking and cross-border payment systems positioning Saudi fintech as a bridge between emerging trade corridors.

Unconventional AI has raised $475 million at a $4.5 billion valuation in what's framed as the largest seed round ever, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed and Sequoia Capital. The company, founded by Naveen Rao, is developing oscillator-based chips that could reduce AI inference power consumption by up to 1,000 times. The pre-revenue startup released Un-0, an image generation model running on a simulation of its architecture, as proof the approach can replicate conventional AI workloads. Unconventional plans to release chip schematics soon, targeting a system-on-chip tape-in in 2026 and mass delivery in 2027. Rao previously co-founded Nervana Systems, acquired by Intel for $400 million, and MosaicML, acquired by Databricks for $1.3 billion. The funding addresses growing concerns about AI's energy consumption, with data centres projected to exceed 1,000 TWh by late 2026.