Every restaurant in the GCC
deserves to own its customer.
"We've watched too many great kitchens, family-run cafés, and corner-shop supermarkets give 30–35% of every order to platforms they don't control. The food is theirs. The customer is theirs. The risk is theirs. The margin should be too.
Blinknow exists to put the operating system back in the operator's hands — software that handles ordering, payments, delivery, and loyalty as one tenant, priced as software, not as a tax.
Three principles, non-negotiable.
The customer relationship is the operator's, not the platform's.
Every feature we ship is judged by one question: does this hand more control to the operator, or does it pull control toward us? If it's the latter, we don't ship it.
Software pricing. Published. Predictable.
Flat monthly fees you can read on the homepage. No "contact us for quote." No volume-tier surprises. No hidden take-rate buried in TOS section 14(c).
Built where it runs.
Arabic-first UI. Mada and Apple Pay UAE day one. ZATCA, UAE FTA, halal certification flows. WhatsApp-first because that's how the region orders. Not a US product with translations.
Operators who've shipped at scale.
Engineering and product leaders from payments, marketplaces, and POS. Now building one platform, in one city.
Santha Balaji
20+ years building commerce platforms. Previously led engineering at a regional payments unicorn. Architected Blinknow's multi-tenant core.
Rana Al-Khatib
Built and sold a regional restaurant tech company. Walked the floor of 200+ outlets across UAE and KSA before writing a line of code.
Yusuf Khalil
Ex-Careem product lead. Shipped the WhatsApp ordering primitive used by 12,000+ regional merchants. Owns Blinknow's merchant experience.
Priya Menon
15 years selling SaaS to GCC F&B. Built the first 50-outlet portfolio at a Foodics rival before joining as founding sales lead.
Omar Hassan
Ex-Talabat infrastructure. Knows what aggregator scale looks like from the inside — and exactly where its weak points are.
Layla Ahmed
Designed Mada's consumer wallet experience. Leads brand and product design — Arabic-first, RTL-native from day one.
From idea to live in 14 months.
Founding hypothesis
Rana and Santha walk 60+ outlets in Dubai and Sharjah. Every operator says the same thing: "I'd pay anything to stop paying aggregators." We started writing code that week.
MVP shipped · 3 pilot outlets
WhatsApp ordering + POS + payments live. Pilot customers — 1 café, 1 cloud kitchen, 1 family restaurant — running daily transactions on Blinknow.
Pilot expanded · supermarket module in test
7 outlets live. Loyalty and delivery engine in production. First supermarket pilot in private alpha. Seed round opens.
Seed close · 50-outlet target
Close AED 3.67M seed. Hire field sales team. Launch in Riyadh with KSA Country Manager. Target 50 paying outlets by year-end.
Scale to 600 outlets · Series A
Multi-outlet groups. Native customer app. API platform open. AED 5.2M revenue run-rate. Series A to fuel KSA + Qatar expansion.
Build the GCC's commerce OS with us.
12 open roles across engineering, sales, and ops. Dubai and Riyadh. Real equity. Real impact on real operators.
See open roles- Senior Backend Engineer
- iOS Engineer (POS)
- Field Sales · Dubai
- Field Sales · Riyadh
- Customer Success Lead
- Product Designer
- + 6 more →