Sovra's Ahmed Wehbi got kicked out of his own bank years ago — now he's building a fintech that makes sure no one else does

Ahmed Wehbi's origin story starts with him standing outside a bank that had just refused to give him his own money. That experience inspired what has become his first venture, backed by some of the region’s most influential entrepreneurs and b’naires — a self-custody fintech built on stablecoins that lets people hold and move their money with no intermediary standing in between.

Wehbi has just closed a pre-seed round for Sovra and is preparing for launch this quarter. The first target markets are the ones global fintechs skip — think Lebanon, Syria, Iraq.

Each week, My Morning Routine looks at how a member of the community starts their day — and throws in a couple of questions just for fun. This week, we sat down with Wehbi (LinkedIn) to talk about how the company came to be, how he’s building , what his mornings (and evenings) actually look like, and what he's reading right now. Edited excerpts from our conversation, lightly cleaned up for clarity:

EnterpriseAM: Where did the idea for Sovra actually come from?

Ahmed Wehbi: I worked hard for a big part of my 20s — in consulting, traveling back and forth across the GCC and the region, serving different clients, and building up savings for my future, putting it in a bank, in a savings account, thinking that that was the right thing to do. And then one day I started to hear that banks [in Lebanon, where I’m from] were shutting their doors and no longer giving people access to their money. I called my bank since I was abroad. I said, “Hey, can I access my money?” and I didn't get a clear answer.

So I took the first plane back home, went to the bank, made my case as to why I've been working hard and my money is my money and I should have it — but that went nowhere, and I was basically kicked out. When I was on the street, I realized that seeing a number on a screen and actually having access to it are two very different things.

It got me thinking: what is money in the first place, and what does it symbolize? I realized that money is basically effort you've spent in the past for the purpose that you plan to spend in the future. It comes as a store of a certain value, of work that you've done, because you don't want to spend it right now. And so how that money is stored, and what kind of system we design around that, can be life-changing — not only for individuals but for civilization. That's where I started to explore how technology could help solve this, and whether we really need intermediaries standing between us and our money.

E: How did the fundraising process start? And why did you go for a mix of angel investors and a VC?

AW: Once I realized the need for something like Sovra was there, the first thing I did was immerse myself in the technology. I worked for a startup that was building deep infrastructure for a couple of years. I wanted to learn the weeds before I could design and create the end product that people would use.

Throughout that journey I also saw what worked elsewhere, particularly Latin America, where there's an ecosystem of thriving applications solving problems similar to ours. That's where I took inspiration from, and I happened to meet the managing director of our VC that led the round — Pharsalus Capital — who also shared my belief that we could use technology to enhance personal sovereignty and the ability for people to own their money in the places that need it most, which is our region.

We set out to find established entrepreneurs and funders — people who'd also had their own successes solving problems at scale for the region, and in some cases even using the same technology. This set of investors and myself really found each other and aligned around two things: the size of the problem and how important it is to solve it, and the potential of the technology.

E: Stablecoins are still relatively new to the region, even as recognition of them grows in the UAE. What's the main challenge in building the technology — and in building the trust that gets people comfortable using it?

AW: This region is very diverse. It has parts with a very developed banking and financial ecosystem, and then parts where people are stuffing banknotes under the mattress because local institutions have failed. We are building primarily right now for the latter — less so places with established infrastructure, more so places where local solutions have failed people and international solutions don't extend. We see these global fintechs promising global reach and faster, cheaper access to financial services, but they very often exclude places like Lebanon, Syria, Iraq. That's where we believe the need is biggest.

The cool thing about self-custodial architecture and stablecoins is that they're borderless, so they can move across borders very easily and very cheaply. The problem is that the technology has been complex to use so far. So the challenge becomes creating a product that's easy and intuitive enough for people to use, that integrates into their lives without requiring them to go out of their way to learn something new — and also educating people on what solutions exist, because that becomes the core of the trust we're trying to build. We solve for trust by explaining to users very transparently, very openly, everything that's going on, where their money is, showing it to them at any point in time — not asking them to trust us, but building a system that doesn't require trust in the first place.

E: Who's actually building the technology? Have you had to partner with outside institutions?

AW: What we're building is the technology layer that makes this global financial infrastructure accessible to people, and the entire build of that layer is something we do in-house — we have a team, mostly on the engineering side. Then we partner with financial institutions or providers that live under the hood and offer licensed financial services to our users. So any activity that interfaces with a financial activity — people depositing, withdrawing, issuing a card, paying with their balances, sending to banks, receiving from banks — all of that is conducted through licensed third parties that we integrate onto the platform.

E: Tell us about your morning routine — what does it actually look like?

AW: I check Slack within five seconds of waking up. Then I put my phone aside, try to wake up, take my dog for a walk, have some coffee, and catch up on what's going on on X mainly — a lot of what happens in this space happens on X. Sometimes, if I have time for it, a yoga or a gym session in the morning before coming to the office, if we're in Beirut, or jumping online if I'm in Dubai or elsewhere.

E: And in the evening — how do you wind down?

AW: I don't think I do. I try — with my wife, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Having team members across multiple time zones means sometimes I need to be present at different times of the day. I try my best to find moments of peace and quiet, more so in the morning after checking Slack.

Wehbi’s favorites

What he's reading: Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio. I've been really going deep into the definition of money.

What he does in his spare time: Movement, in whatever form is on offer — yoga, football, martial arts. I just like to move my body and I find it gives me a lot of peace and clarity of mind.

Favorite piece of advice: You can think about things all you want, the only way to find out is when you do. It helps me as a former consultant and as a person who likes to think strategically and really assess and evaluate things. I've realized that a lot of times the answer does not lie in my mind — it lies in how my body and my intuition is reacting to things.