When Lebanon’s currency collapsed and public services began to fail, founders were forced to build under conditions that most startup ecosystems never test for: unreliable electricity, frozen banking systems, and a shrinking domestic market. What emerged was not a pause in innovation, but a shift in how it happens.
Rather than wait for stability, Lebanese entrepreneurs began designing companies around the dysfunction itself, tools for cross-border payments, remote work, logistics, and digital services that could operate despite broken infrastructure. Many of those products, shaped by constraint, have since found global markets, drawing talent and capital back into the country even as local conditions remain volatile.
Global non-profit Endeavor that has been transforming emerging economies by fuelling homegrown entrepreneurship has brought its network of mentors, investors and operators to the country. Initiatives like Offshore have been created to build a community of Lebanese founders worldwide who can connect and support one another, and the Beirut Digital District has opened its doors to create a self-sustaining tech hub in the capital.
The country’s infrastructure requires significant improvement, but the new government’s appointment of a minister of state for technology and artificial intelligence indicates potential for institutional momentum that was previously lacking. This may help the state catch up with entrepreneurs and finally provide the support they have been building without.
Sovra
When the 2019 financial crash hit, and Lebanon’s currency lost over 90% of its value, Sovra cofounder and CEO Ahmed Wehbi watched his savings become inaccessible. “What people think is safe and that is theirs can just vanish and disappear overnight,” he says. Banks imposed withdrawal limits, and savings that had taken years to build became unreachable or worthless. “A lot of innovation is born from crisis. As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention.”
Time and again, he’d watched legacy financial systems break under stress, with people’s savings disappearing overnight. It became clear to him that this was “a problem I needed to contribute to fixing”. That realisation led to a blockchain-based financial platform that gives users true ownership of their money through self-custody.
Users hold digital dollars in self-custody wallets that only they can access, and banks can’t freeze accounts or restrict withdrawals. “The message here isn’t ‘Hey, do not trust party A, trust Sovra’. Instead, it becomes, you now have technology which enables you to hold your money without ever trusting anyone else,” Wehbi explains.
While Sovra was built in response to Lebanon’s crisis, its solution addresses problems across the MENA region and has been developed with broader international use in view.
And apart from engendering that sense of security, Sovra also tackles two major regional challenges: first, by unlocking yield on digital dollars through decentralised finance, offering returns of up to 6% even as traditional interest products vanish; second, by transforming remittances. Stablecoins, backed by real dollars, enable instant, fee-free transfers, a game-changer in a region where $60 billion in remittances flow each year, and traditional services take a costly cut. “It’s autonomy, it’s empowerment. It’s true and real ownership.”
