Saudi startup Qarah raises a million-riyal angel round to digitise water filtration and misting services, targeting a fragmented but essential market.
Saudi startup Qarah has raised a million-riyal investment round led by angel investors, signalling early investor confidence in the Kingdom’s under-digitised water services sector.
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Founded in early 2025 by Mansour bin Mohammed Al Shahrani and officially launched in June, Qarah operates a digital marketplace focused on water desalination filters, misting, and fog systems. Through its mobile platform, customers can purchase, maintain, and service filtration and spray systems by connecting directly with vetted service providers across Saudi Arabia.
The platform targets inefficiencies in a fragmented market where pricing opacity, inconsistent service quality, and slow response times remain common. Qarah aims to standardise pricing, streamline service requests, and improve reliability across residential and commercial use cases.
Beyond consumers, the startup is positioning itself as an income-generating platform for technicians and service providers, offering more predictable demand and access to a broader customer base. This supply-side focus is increasingly seen as critical to the sustainability of on-demand service marketplaces.
Al Shahrani said the new capital will be used to support the company’s next phase of growth, including operational expansion and execution of its strategic roadmap. He described the funding as an early milestone in building a specialised digital infrastructure for water-related services in the Kingdom.
The raise comes as Saudi Arabia continues to invest heavily in water security, desalination, and infrastructure modernisation, creating tailwinds for technology platforms operating at the intersection of utilities and services.
Why Qarah Funding Matters to MENA
Qarah’s raise highlights a growing shift in the MENA startup ecosystem: innovation is moving beyond fintech and e-commerce into essential infrastructure services that touch everyday life. Water filtration, desalination, and misting systems are mission-critical in the Gulf, yet the service layer around them remains fragmented, offline, and inefficient.
For startups, this signals a widening opportunity to apply marketplace and platform models to regulated, utility-adjacent sectors that have long been overlooked by venture capital. Rather than building new hardware or infrastructure, companies like Qarah are digitising access, pricing, and service delivery—an approach that is capital-efficient and easier to scale across cities and regions.
From a Saudi perspective, the model aligns closely with Vision 2030 priorities, including SME enablement, localization of services, and technology-led efficiency in water and environmental management. By formalising demand for technicians and service providers, the platform also supports workforce participation and income stability, a recurring challenge across on-demand service startups in the region.
More broadly, Qarah reflects a maturing startup ecosystem where founders are targeting real-world problems with defensible demand, rather than chasing short-term consumer trends. As MENA investors look for sustainable, infrastructure-linked growth stories, water-tech and service-enablement platforms are starting to look less niche—and more inevitable.
