Saudi Arabia-based corporate travel technology platform FlyAkeed has secured SAR 94.3 million ($25.15 million) in growth funding as it moves to deepen its position in the Kingdom’s rapidly expanding business travel market.
The financing, announced at LEAP 2026 in Riyadh, combines an equity investment with Murabaha sukuk financing. The equity round was led by Sanabil Investments, the investment company wholly owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), with participation from Artal Capital, stc Group’s corporate venture capital fund tali ventures and Aljazira Capital. Artal Capital also led the Murabaha sukuk financing.
Founded in 2015 by Bassam Almohammadi, FlyAkeed provides businesses with a centralized platform for managing corporate travel, covering flights, hotels, ground transportation, approvals, travel policies and expenditure.
The company now plans to use the new capital primarily to expand an embedded deferred-payment offering designed for large enterprises, giving corporate customers greater flexibility in settling their travel invoices.
Turning Corporate Travel Into an Operating System
For many businesses, corporate travel remains surprisingly fragmented. Employees may book through different channels, managers approve trips through email or messaging applications, finance teams reconcile expenses separately, and travel policies can be difficult to enforce consistently.
FlyAkeed is attempting to bring those processes into one digital layer.
Its platform allows employees to book flights, hotels and ground transportation within company-defined policies, while enterprises can automate approvals, establish travel rules and monitor spending through a centralized dashboard. The objective is not simply to make travel booking easier, but to give companies greater control and visibility over the entire corporate travel workflow.
“Corporate travel in our region still runs on phone calls, WhatsApp groups and spreadsheets. We are replacing that with an operating system: every trip inside policy, every riyal visible in real time, every approval in seconds,” said Bassam Almohammadi, founder and CEO of FlyAkeed.
That positioning becomes particularly relevant as Saudi Arabia’s corporate economy grows and companies increasingly look for software that can digitize traditionally manual business processes.
A $10 Billion Corporate Travel Opportunity
The timing of the investment reflects the scale of the market FlyAkeed is targeting. According to figures cited by the company, business travel expenditure in Saudi Arabia exceeded $10 billion in 2024 and is projected to roughly double by 2033.
That growth creates an opportunity beyond travel booking itself. As businesses expand their workforces, regional operations and international relationships, managing travel becomes an increasingly complex combination of procurement, policy enforcement, employee experience and financial administration.
FlyAkeed has built its proposition around that intersection.
The company currently serves more than 150 corporate clients in Saudi Arabia, including PIF, Maaden, Golf Saudi and the National Housing Company. Its platform is designed to allow organizations to standardize travel processes while giving employees a more straightforward way to arrange business trips.
Adding Financing to the Travel Stack
The most significant component of FlyAkeed’s new growth strategy is not another booking feature. It is financing.
The company intends to expand an embedded deferred-payment product for large enterprises, allowing corporate customers to settle travel invoices under more flexible payment terms. In effect, FlyAkeed is moving beyond being a technology platform for managing travel toward becoming part of the financial infrastructure surrounding corporate travel.
“Large enterprises don’t just want better software; they want better payment terms. Now we give them both,” Almohammadi said.
That shift could give FlyAkeed a deeper role in its customers’ financial workflows. Rather than simply facilitating transactions between companies and travel suppliers, the platform can potentially become involved in when and how those transactions are settled.
The combination of software and financing also creates a potentially stronger commercial relationship with enterprise customers, particularly companies with significant and recurring travel expenditure.
Backing From Saudi Arabia’s Investment Ecosystem
The composition of FlyAkeed’s latest financing reflects the growing role of Saudi institutional capital in supporting technology companies addressing large domestic markets.
Sanabil Investments led the equity component, bringing the backing of an investment company owned by PIF. Artal Capital, meanwhile, participated in the equity investment and led the Murabaha sukuk financing, providing a Shariah-compliant funding structure alongside the equity capital.
The round also includes participation from tali ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of stc Group, and Aljazira Capital.
For FlyAkeed, the financing provides both growth capital and a stronger institutional base as it expands its technology and financial products.
The structure is also notable because it combines conventional venture-style equity with Islamic financing, reflecting the increasingly diverse funding mechanisms available to Saudi technology companies.
Building for the Enterprise Economy
FlyAkeed’s evolution is taking place against a broader transformation of Saudi Arabia’s business environment. Companies across sectors are increasingly digitizing procurement, finance, workforce management and other operational functions, creating demand for software that can connect traditionally disconnected workflows.
Corporate travel sits directly within that transformation. A modern travel platform can capture information about who is traveling, where they are going, what they are spending and whether those expenses comply with corporate policies. Adding payment infrastructure creates another layer of data and utility, potentially allowing businesses to manage the entire journey from travel request to final settlement through a single platform.
For FlyAkeed, that represents a larger opportunity than simply competing for bookings.
The ambition is to become the infrastructure through which Saudi companies manage corporate mobility.
The Next Chapter for FlyAkeed
The SAR 94.3 million financing gives FlyAkeed significant room to pursue that ambition. Its immediate priority is expanding the deferred-payment offering for large enterprises, while continuing to build the core travel management platform around the needs of Saudi businesses.
The company enters this phase with more than a decade of operating experience since its founding in 2015 and a customer base spanning major Saudi organizations.
The bigger question is whether FlyAkeed can turn its position in corporate travel into a broader financial and operational platform. If it succeeds, the company could move from being a tool that helps employees book business trips to infrastructure that manages how enterprises procure, control and finance corporate mobility.
For a Saudi traveltech company, that could prove to be the more consequential journey.
