What LEAP Riyadh Taught Me About Building for Saudi Arabia

LEAP in Riyadh is intense.

Maybe it is the 44 degree heat outside. Maybe it is the scale of the event. Maybe it is the enormous crowd moving through the halls, with the majority of Saudi men wearing the traditional white thobe and shemagh.

Or maybe it is simply the feeling that things are moving very fast here.

Whatever it is, Saudi Arabia is doing something with me. It makes you observe, question assumptions and think differently about what a market can look like.

First, you have to get there

LEAP is not exactly around the corner.

I stayed at the Centro Waha hotel in Riyadh, which turned out to be a very practical choice because it is close to Al Murooj metro station. When it is 44 degrees outside, every minute of walking you can avoid is a win.

And the exhibition itself is far outside the city, in the desert.

My daily journey looked something like this:

1. Walk to Al Murooj metro station.
2. Take the metro to SAB, the final station.
3. Get on the dedicated LEAP shuttle bus.
4. Spend roughly 1 hour and 15 minutes on the bus to the exhibition.
5. Discover that a significant part of the route has poor 5G coverage.
6. Give up on the idea that you are going to turn the bus into a productive mobile office.

It takes some effort just to arrive.

And then you walk inside.

The scale is enormous

In European terms, I would compare LEAP with Viva Technology in Paris. LEAP feels at least comparable in size, perhaps even a little bigger. All the major technology companies are here. Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, NVIDIA and many others. And, of course, the major Saudi players such as Aramco and STC.

The booths are huge. Actually, "booth" sometimes feels like the wrong word. Some are closer to small buildings. There is clearly an element of showing strength, scale and ambition. And they are crowded. Not only with visitors, but with employees. Lots of employees. Everywhere you look, someone is ready to introduce a product, start a conversation or find a business opportunity.

There is energy here.

They are ready to do business

That is probably my strongest commercial impression after LEAP. People are ready to talk business. And so are we! But I also came away with two questions for any European SaaS company considering Saudi Arabia.

• Do you need a local office?
• And do you need to speak Arabic?

My first impression is that both would make a significant difference. At our booth, I noticed that many people walked past without starting a conversation. My feeling was that language played an important role. Some people did not speak English comfortably, while others seemed hesitant to start a conversation in English.

That immediately reduces the part of the market you can reach as a European founder standing there alone. Of course, four days at a trade show are not enough to draw conclusions about an entire country. And the results might prove my first impression wrong.

I am leaving LEAP with five good leads. One of them already signed up for our special LEAP program. So let's see what happens next.

Then everybody started asking about WhatsApp

This was the biggest product surprise of the week. A lot of people I spoke with did not immediately understand what I meant by a "shared mailbox." Not because they do not have the underlying business problem. They communicate differently.

WhatsApp is everywhere.

I heard examples of business conversations, documents, contracts and even NDAs being exchanged through WhatsApp. And when I explained what ReplyFabric does with email, the same question kept coming back:

Can you do this for WhatsApp too?

That got my attention. ReplyFabric is built for high-volume, complex shared mailboxes. We read incoming messages, understand what they are about, retrieve the right context, assign work internally and prepare replies. Conceptually, a lot of that could also apply to WhatsApp. The channel changes. Much of the intelligence behind it does not. But that does not automatically mean we should build it.

A feature request is not necessarily a market signal

In Europe, we are not seeing meaningful demand for WhatsApp from our target customers. And I still have questions about how representative my LEAP conversations were of the larger enterprise market in Saudi Arabia. If large Saudi corporations really use WhatsApp for operational business processes at scale, that is extremely interesting for ReplyFabric. If the demand mainly comes from smaller businesses with very different workflows, budgets and compliance requirements, it might simply mean they are not our ICP.

That distinction matters.

As a founder, it is very easy to travel to a new market, hear the same feature request ten times and conclude that you have discovered your next product. For now, WhatsApp goes on the list of things to investigate, but not the priority.

Data sovereignty is not a checkbox here

Another topic came up repeatedly: data sovereignty. And this one is much less ambiguous. I spoke with officials from SDAIA about the requirements in Saudi Arabia. The message was clear: the rules around data, where it is stored and how it is processed need to be taken seriously.

That sent me back to the ReplyFabric architecture.

Google already operates its me-central2 cloud region in Dammam, which gives us an important piece of the infrastructure we would need for a Saudi deployment. Microsoft is the more complicated part for us right now. ReplyFabric uses Azure-based services for parts of our AI processing, including prompt injection detection and TruCheck, our quality-control layer. Microsoft's Saudi cloud region is expected to become available later in 2026.

But looking deeper into the requirements made me realize that data localization is only one part of the puzzle. Running ReplyFabric from the Dammam region can address the question of keeping customer data physically within Saudi Arabia. But we also have to look at what happens when that data is sent to an AI model. Under Saudi Arabia's Personal Data Protection Law, principles such as purpose limitation and data minimization become important. For sensitive enterprise use cases, retention by an external AI provider can therefore become a problem. If a model provider retains prompts or other submitted data for abuse monitoring or safety purposes, simply hosting our own application and database in Saudi Arabia may not be enough.

That leaves us with several architectural options:

• Use enterprise AI services with contractual zero-retention or equivalent data-processing guarantees.
• Replace certain closed models with self-hosted open-source models running inside our Saudi infrastructure.
• Apply Named Entity Recognition and other preprocessing techniques to remove or pseudonymize personal data before it reaches an external model.
• Potentially combine these approaches depending on the type of AI processing involved.

For ReplyFabric, this matters because emails can contain a lot of personal and business-sensitive information. We cannot solve data sovereignty by simply selecting a different cloud region and calling it done. And that is perhaps the bigger lesson. Entering a country is not simply a sales decision. It can become an architecture decision. You can have the right product, find an interested enterprise customer and agree on the business case, but still need to ask a very technical question: where exactly does every piece of data go during every step of the AI processing?

For European SaaS founders looking at Saudi Arabia, I think that question deserves attention much earlier than you might expect.

And then there is the wealth

You cannot spend time at LEAP without noticing the wealth of Saudi Arabia. It is visible in the infrastructure, the booths, the scale of the investments and the way companies present themselves. Sometimes very visibly.

This was also the first trade show where I saw people walking around with VVIP badges. Not VIP. VVIP. Very Very Important Person.

I did not get to talk to them. Maybe next time ;-).

LEAP changed some of my assumptions

I came to Riyadh primarily to introduce ReplyFabric to a new market. I am leaving with more questions than I arrived with, which is probably a good result.

I learned that Saudi Arabia is a market where local presence may matter more than I expected. Language is a real consideration. Data sovereignty can influence the architecture of your product. And business communication habits can be fundamentally different from what we see in Europe.

Most unexpectedly, I arrived thinking about shared mailboxes and left thinking about WhatsApp. That does not mean ReplyFabric suddenly changes direction. Quite the opposite.

Part of building a company is knowing the difference between adapting your product to a market and allowing every new market to redefine your product.

1. We have five promising leads to follow up.
2. We have one LEAP participant already signed up for our special program.
3. And we have a much better understanding of what it would actually mean to bring ReplyFabric to Saudi Arabia.

Not bad for a few very hot days in the desert.