Laith Zraikat

Partner

2015 - 2023

Arzan VC is a forward looking venture capital firm that was born out of and is funded by Arzan Financial Group. Based in Kuwait and Dubai, it launched in 2015 with the vision to enable and invest in founders who want to change the status quo, wherever they are and whatever problems they are solving. With no geographic mandate Arzan VC has so far made investments in the MENA region, USA, and Canada. Arzan has invested in 43 companies across 2 funds, including Careem, Swvl, Mejuri, Ikcon, Zid, Trukker.

Advisor, Investor

2015 - 2018

LUNCH:ON solves the problem of lunch at work by pairing busy people with the best lunch options in the city with super easy ordering via email and SMS text.

Advisor

2015 - 2017

HWK takes Programming Science Concepts meant for university students aged and simplifies them for kids aged 8-12, through a complete school curriculum. It hopes to inspire and develop different skills in children throughout the learning process which will result in more new ideas, entrepreneurial thinking, and employment opportunities and more investments. HWK is on a mission to teach 1 Million kids to learn the 21st century programming skills by the year 2020.

Mentor

2010 - 2015

Advisor

2012 - 2015

Interim CTO

2012 - 2012

TasmeemME is the regions pioneer and leading Creative Jobs online marketplace. Working with the team was a fun and inspiring experience. The company needed to take the site off of Drupal, and redevelop it entirely using php Yii Framework, and it had to be done in-house. The challenge was to create a product and development team in a startup that had been outsourcing it's development since inception. We adopted an agile plan that divided the task in to small milestones and were able to hire, train, and deliver with the 3 month time-frame. TasmeemME have an outstanding team that is relentlessly bent on on improving the lives of thousands of designers and creatives in the Arab World. I'm proud to have been a part of that mission.

Advisor, Interim CTO

2012 - 2012

OpenSooq is a leading online classifieds destination in the Arab World with over 100 million monthly page views. I Had the privilege of working with the OpenSooq team to rebuild the website and migrate to a more agile and more robust development framework (Yii Framework). I was charged with planning and managing the transition, training the existing team, as well as the recruitment and integration of new engineers.

Co-Founder, Chief Product Officer

2007 - 2012

(2007 - 2009) Jeeran became the Arab World's largest self publishing platform, reaching about 7 million unique monthly visitors, and providing a wide array of apps: Site builder, blogs, video sharing, photo sharing, and private file storage. (2009 - 2012) Seeing how the internet landscape was changing, and that users were switching to blog and publish on new platforms like Facebook and Twitter, we felt the time was right to go back to our roots and better serve local businesses. We build a local business listings and reviews directory. A decision was later made to close down the old publishing platform and focus on the new products, making Jeeran, the "Yelp" of the Arab World. The concept of reviews was totally new in our region. As CPO, I was responsible for shaping the new product and tailoring it for Arab audiences, managing the product teams and KPIs, and experimenting with data acquisition strategies. During this time the product teams tackled deep challenges in semantic search -both in Arabic and English- and created definitions for terminologies and use cases where there were no previous examples, starting with Arabizing the word "Review". My responsibilities also included setting up a User Experience department working with user-centric methodologies and processes that put user research and feedback first. The UX team was able to understand user needs and design web, mobile web, and smartphone apps with great success. Between (2009-2012) we had built the #1 local listings and reviews platform in the Arab World, and attracted investment from 500 Startups, Intel Capital, Fadi Ghandour (Aramex), Rabea Ataya (Bayt), SeedCamp, and follow-on investments from ATH.

Co-founder, Chief Product Officer, CTO

2005 - 2007

We caught the web 2.0 train and built a blogging service which later became the largest blogging service out of the Arab World hosting nearly 200,000 blogs. Still doing UI and coding, I was able to expand the product and development team from 3 to 7 (including myself). By 2007 we had reached 1 million registered users, 5 million unique monthly visitors, and secured our first VC funding from ATH (http://acceleratortech.com/).

Co-founder, Product & Software Development Manager

2002 - 2005

Hired and trained a small team of 2 developers and 1 designer who became responsible for the development of Jeeran's products. I was responsible for translating the company vision into products and features which were easy to use and addressed user needs. Was still coding throughout that period as well. During this period we expanded our product line to include: An private online file storage and sharing service, and a browser based image/photo editor. We also migrated our entire platform from classic ASP to ASP.Net.

Co-founder, Software Developer

2000 - 2002

Co-founded the first free web hosting platform in the Middle East. Jeeran was the result a pivot from a previous model -JordanMall.com- between 1997-2000 which focused on bringing local businesses online by providing them with free tools and hosting to build their websites. It turned out that individuals were more interested in creating home pages than businesses were, so we decided to pivot, rebrand, and relaunch what later became the leading self publishing platform in the Middle East. In the early years, I was responsible for UI Design, and the development of user-facing products in classic ASP (asp 3.0). Took flagship product from a simple web-based file manager to a full fledged site builder that -by 2007- saw over 600,000 websites built on top of it. The site builder allowed user to pick a theme and customize layout and content. It also included widgets like page counter, guest book, e-mail forms, and a mailing list manager. In 2002 we started providing a bi-lingual interface, and my responsibilities included Arabic/English UI text writing (for the interface elements).

Co-founder, Web developer, Designer

1997 - 2000

JordanMall was an ambitious -yet premature- attempt to bring local businesses in Jordan onto the World Wide Web. The fastest way to get people to try that was to make it free, so we built the first free hosting service in the Arab World, modeled after GeoCities. After 2 years of trials and talking to users we noticed that we had far more individuals building websites than we had businesses. In the summer of 2000, we pivoted into a free personal homepage platform, and we called it JEERAN (jeeran.com) -meaning "neighbors" in Arabic.