Saudi student turns USD 133 wedding gig into USD 300k startup

INVE has raised USD 300k in pre-seed funding from Outliers Venture Capital to expand its corporate events platform and take its consumer business beyond weddings, founder and CEO Abdulrahman Alabdulkarim (LinkedIn) tells EnterpriseAM.

It started with a family wedding: In late 2023, Alabdulkarim’s sister asked him to build a system for sending personalized wedding invitations over WhatsApp, and paid him SAR 500 (USD 133). He was studying computer science with little hands-on development experience, so he taught himself the build from YouTube tutorials. That side job has since grown into a platform that has supported more than 250 events across 60-plus cities in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.

The push into corporate came in August, when INVE launched a subscription platform aimed at companies that run multiple events a year — investor gatherings, dinners, product launches — rather than the occasional large conference. The software lets them manage guest databases, track attendance, and store details like dietary preferences and professional interests, then search attendance records, identify frequent guests, and segment contacts by industry to personalize later events. Customer data is encrypted and hosted in the Kingdom.

“We’re not an invitation app,” Alabdulkarim said. “We have more in our suite of products than just invitations.” He describes the model as “relationship-based event management,” arguing that businesses often lose valuable guest information between events or repeatedly request details they already collected.

The investor was also its first corporate customer. Outliers used INVE to run its own events before putting money in. The firm has backed Saudi fintech unicorn Tabby, Lean Technologies, and US AI coding platform Replit.

Use of proceeds: INVE will use the funding to hire, develop its software, and attract customers across its consumer and corporate platforms. “We want to use the current investment to its full capacity and grow the company with it,” Alabdulkarim said, adding that he is not seeking another funding round for now. He declined to disclose INVE’s valuation or the stake Outliers acquired.

Another USD 1.5 mn for Ghanem

Saudi fractional property platform Ghanem raised USD 1.5 mn in a pre-seed extension, taking the round to USD 8.6 mn, according to a press release (pdf). Real estate companies and strategic angel investors joined the extension, which builds on the USD 7.1 mn Ghanem raised last November with participation from Al Romaih Group. The company says it will use the fresh funding to develop its product, diversify the properties it offers, and build partnerships.

Beyond the funding: Ghanem says its platform now links directly to the Real Estate Registry, where investors’ fractional stakes are registered in their names. It has issued digital deeds to 580 investors in its first income-generating property and begun paying out rental income, early steps toward the SAR 1 bn in assets under management the firm told us last year that it was targeting within three years.

REMEMBER- Ghanem is still operating within the Real Estate General Authority’s regulatory sandbox. Its path to a permanent license hinges on a national tokenization law, CEO Saleh Alghamdi told us in April. He also said then that Ghanem expected to open the platform to non-Saudi investors this year and was exploring tokenizing off-plan properties with the regulator.