Ahmed Salama: Building Saudi’s Arabia's Subscription Rails with Techrar

In Saudi Arabia’s shift from one-off transactions to recurring relationships, an infrastructure story is taking shape. At the center of it is Ahmed Salama, a Jeddah-based tech entrepreneur with more than a decade in eCommerce and enterprise systems, and now co-founder and CEO of Techrar, a platform powering subscriptions, memberships, and recurring billing for Saudi and regional merchants.

Under his leadership, Techrar has already processed over 100 million SAR in transactions and is now aiming for 1 billion SAR in annual volume, turning a once-niche idea about subscriptions into a serious engine for predictable, recurring revenue.

Backstory & Spark

Ahmed’s route to Techrar did not start with “subscriptions” as a buzzword. It started with systems you can’t afford to break. Armed with a Computer Engineering degree from Carleton University in Canada, he began his career in software development, working on cloud-based automated speech recognition systems in Ottawa. This early exposure to distributed systems and performance constraints shows up later in how Techrar handles scale and reliability.

Learning Mission-Critical Operations

Back in Saudi Arabia, Ahmed moved into roles that sat at the intersection of IT, operations, and revenue. At SAUDIA Airlines and Saudi Ground Services, he worked on IT service management and built systems to manage portfolios, staff rosters, and daily operations. At Ithraa Consulting, he helped design national digital platforms for tickets, assessments, and engagement. The key inflection point came at flyadeal, where he led internet booking engines, mobile apps, payment integrations, and cloud infrastructure on Azure and AWS, earning recognition as the airline’s “innovation champion” in 2019.

Across all these roles, a clear pattern emerged for Ahmed: when operations are complex and margins are tight, the only way to really grow is to treat technology as a strategic growth engine, not just an internal IT function.

First Entrepreneurial Leap: Wijha

By 2018, Ahmed tested his entrepreneurial instincts with Wijha, an independent marketing and advertising company that connects customers to the most entertaining social events and deals in the market. Wijha builds custom bundles of services using a wide and diverse network of trusted merchants.

Through Wijha, Ahmed got a front-row view of consumer behavior, merchant economics, and offer design. It also reinforced a key lesson he would carry into Techrar: without tight integration between systems, customer experience, and payments, even strong demand can leak through operational gaps.

Spotting the Subscription Gap

The spark for Techrar came when Ahmed noticed a surge in subscription-based businesses, especially in F&B, wellness, and services, but no Saudi-built, merchant-friendly infrastructure to support recurring revenue at scale.

Merchants were:

• Stitching together multiple tools
• Losing customers to friction
• Leaving predictable, recurring revenue on the table

Techrar was built as the answer: a subscription-first eCommerce platform that helps merchants grow sales, retain customers, and automate operations around recurring revenue.

Execution & Growth

A Platform Built for Recurring Commerce

Techrar positions itself as the infrastructure behind every subscription:

• Subscription & membership management: plans, renewals, pausing, and flexible billing cycles.
• Instant branded web & mobile apps so merchants can launch quickly without internal tech teams.
• Automated payments and invoicing, integrated with local and regional payment gateways.
• Analytics & dashboards that surface churn, lifetime value, and cohort behavior, enabling merchants to make decisions based on data.

Ahmed’s engineering and ITSM background shows clearly here: the product is not a “nice storefront.” It’s a stack for recurring revenue.

Funding and Scale

In April 2025, Techrar raised 6 million SAR in an investment round led by Wa’ed Ventures, the venture capital arm of Aramco Entrepreneurship. Today, Techrar positions itself as the largest Saudi platform for managing subscriptions, memberships, and recurring billing. The new capital is focused on three priorities:

• Expanding the team to keep up with merchant demand
• Accelerating product development, including AI-powered features
• Entering new markets beyond Saudi Arabia

So far, the platform has already handled tens of millions of dollars in subscription sales and served hundreds of thousands of end-users, becoming a key infrastructure player for F&B, wellness, and other service-based businesses moving into subscriptions.

Ahmed notes that Techrar processed more than 100 million SAR in transactions last year, with an internal goal of reaching 1 billion SAR in volume this year, a sign of both strong traction and ambitious, but grounded, growth plans.

Ecosystem Partnerships: Integration as Strategy

Ahmed doesn’t seem to believe in building in isolation. Techrar’s growth thesis leans heavily on ecosystem alignment:

• Partnership with Tamara (2024): to offer “buy now, pay later” and split-payment services for eCommerce merchants, giving customers more flexibility while increasing basket size and conversion.
• Partnership with Tap Payments (2025): a strategic move to pair Techrar’s subscription infrastructure with Tap’s regional payment rails, signed personally by Ahmed and Tap’s KSA Managing Director.

These moves turn Techrar into more than a SaaS tool. It becomes a node in the fintech and commerce network of the Gulf.

Aligning with Vision 2030 Priorities

Ahmed frames the journey as a shift from an ambitious idea to a national mission to improve quality of life across food, sports, health, and education. He links his work directly to four Vision 2030 realization programs:

1. Quality of Life
2. Healthcare Transformation
3. Financial Sector Development
4. National Industrial Development and Logistics

This positions subscriptions as a practical tool to advance national goals. As part of this direction, he highlighted three further strategic partnerships, with Body Korea to support early detection and healthier lifestyles, Nana to scale healthy meal subscriptions, and Nash to automate logistics and fleet operations. It’s a clear example of how he thinks about alignment: product, partners, and impact all moving in step with the country’s long-term priorities.

Leadership Style & Culture: Systems Thinking, Merchant Obsession

Ahmed’s leadership style is shaped by years of working on mission-critical IT and enterprise systems: structured, reliable, and deeply service-oriented. He talks about Techrar in merchant-first terms, helping businesses grow sales, retain customers, and streamline operations, not just “shipping features.” His background in ITIL-based service management shows up in how Techrar runs: clear processes, SLAs, and decisions driven by real usage data and merchant feedback.

Beyond Techrar, he’s also stepping into ecosystem roles as a Board Member at Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) Jeddah, an EO member, and an angel investor in Allotment, a signal that he’s now recycling his experience and network into the next generation of founders.

Beyond Techrar: Parallel Bets on Consumer & Family Tech

In parallel to Techrar, Ahmed co-founded Wali App in late 2025, a smart app built for parents and schools. Parents often struggle to keep track of school meal plans, activities, and payments. Wali solves that by simplifying subscriptions and payments for student services. For families, it offers peace of mind and better control. For schools, it enables a healthier, more organized student experience without administrative overload.

An Architect of the Next Wave

What stands out in Ahmed’s journey is not just what he’s building, but how he’s building it. He moves from complex systems to human problems with the same calm, structured mindset: listen carefully, design for reliability, and keep the end user at the center. He treats technology as a service, not a spectacle, whether he’s helping merchants, parents, or fellow founders. And as he shifts more of his energy into mentoring, investing, and community roles, he starts to look less like a solo entrepreneur and more like one of the quiet architects of Saudi Arabia’s next entrepreneurial generation.

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