“In Sharqia You Grow Up And Work For Aramco.” How A College Kid Built Restaurant OS Processing $13B Shakira [k7st4QWf5L7]

Is the software business dying? Loulou sits down with Ahmad Al Zaini, co-founder and CEO of Foodics, at the 11-year mark of the company for the operator's read on the biggest question in tech this year: what happens to software when AI agents replace the human at the login screen.

Foodics is the restaurant operating system for the region: 40,000+ locations across the GCC, Egypt and Jordan, $13B in payments processed to date, on track for $14B by end of year, 700 people, licensed by the Saudi Central Bank, backed by a $198M capital raise including a record $170M Series C. Ahmad is a Forbes-recognized

entrepreneur with executive credentials from Harvard, Stanford and MIT, and was appointed to the Endeavor Saudi board of directors in 2026.

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Chapters

01:42 Foodics at 11: the top line, $13B GMV, 40,000 locations, 40% revenue outside Saudi

04:08 From Al Khobar to Aramco to Foodics: why ulster vs stormers the founder was never supposed to be a founder

09:43 Investor due diligence in reverse: not all money is equal, cap-table hygiene from an serena dandini acquirer's chair

14:47 Growth capital advice: do not take from Saudi at growth stage, go global, come back with matched terms

18:36 40 SF VC meetings, 3 term sheets: how to raise when nobody knows where Riyadh is

21:04 Talent reverse migration: C-suite relocating from Boston, NY, SF, Paris and London to Riyadh

23:54 AI is out of the box: the Anthropic February 2026 SaaS selloff explained

31:15 The PhD intern: how a fresh graduate should show up with an AI use case, not a certificate

33:37 The pricing shift: nobody pays for logins in 2030, everyone pays for outcomes and usage

43:09 The exit conversation: if for one minute you decide you need to exit, you are not in the right business

48:45 Secondary markets, buybacks, and why every employee should have liquidity options

53:46 The under-30 Saudi generation: high-school AI hackathons, curiosity, and where they spend

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