Saudi Arabia’s startup ecosystem continues to produce founders building technology around everyday business challenges. INVE, an event technology startup founded by 23-year-old Abdulrahman Alabdulkarim, has secured $300,000 in pre-seed funding from Outliers Venture Capital to grow its platform for managing events and guest relationships.
The company, founded in 2024, began with a practical problem. Alabdulkarim wanted to make invitation and guest management easier for his sister’s wedding. He developed an initial product to address the challenge, which eventually evolved into a consumer platform now being extended to corporate customers.
The latest funding will help INVE strengthen its team, invest in brand development and reach more customers, with Saudi Arabia and the wider Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region forming its immediate growth markets.
Turning Event Planning Into a Digital Experience
INVE offers digital tools that allow hosts to manage the process of organising an event, from inviting guests to handling registrations and issuing digital entry passes. Its features include personalised invitations, RSVP tracking, branded registration pages and guest profiles.
The company reports that its consumer platform has been used for 250 events across more than 60 cities and towns in Saudi Arabia and the GCC. More than 35,000 invitations have been sent through the platform, with an RSVP response rate of 88%.
Having established a presence in private events, INVE is now looking to serve a wider range of occasions, including birthdays, business gatherings and large-scale professional events.
Bringing Guest Relationships Into Focus
The company’s newer business offering, launched in August 2026, targets organisations that regularly host events and need a more organised way to manage their attendees.
For these organisations, guest details and communication histories can become difficult to maintain when information is spread across separate tools. INVE aims to give businesses a central place to retain guest information and make it useful for subsequent events.
Guest profiles can capture details such as preferences, interests and previous attendance. Businesses can use these records to personalise invitations and reduce the need to repeatedly collect the same information.
The platform also allows companies to maintain their branding across invitations, registration pages and digital passes. INVE is targeting customers such as technology firms, investment companies, financial services businesses and agencies that organise events for clients.
An Investor That Knows the Product Firsthand
Outliers VC’s investment follows an existing commercial relationship with INVE. The venture capital firm became the startup’s first paid business design partner, using its platform for branded invitations and guest communications. It is also preparing to use INVE for its upcoming Builder Summit.
For Outliers, this experience provided an opportunity to evaluate the product in a real business setting before investing.
Sarah AlSaleh, General Partner at Outliers VC, pointed to Alabdulkarim’s engineering experience and appreciation of hospitality as strengths behind the business. She said the firm was backing the founder and his ambition to improve how organisations engage with their communities.
The partnership gives INVE an early business customer whose own event requirements can help inform the development of its corporate offering.
Regional Growth Comes First
INVE plans to use its new capital to build its team and strengthen customer acquisition across its two platforms. While the product can be accessed internationally, the company’s near-term priority is to grow its customer base in Saudi Arabia and neighbouring GCC markets.
Over time, it hopes to expand its business offering into North Africa, other African markets and Europe.
Alabdulkarim brings a technical background to the venture, having previously worked on backend and infrastructure systems at Lean Technologies. He graduated from King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, where he received the President’s Medal for Entrepreneurship for INVE, becoming the university’s second recipient of the distinction.
INVE’s next phase will test whether the traction it has achieved in private events can translate into repeat use by businesses. Its opportunity lies in making event management more than a one-off administrative task, helping hosts preserve useful information and build stronger relationships with the people they bring together.
