In the summer of 2020, while the rest of the world was figuring out how to survive a pandemic, a Lebanese-born entrepreneur named Jad Antoun was staring at a problem that had irritated him for years. Not the virus. The mortgage. Specifically, the grotesque inefficiency of buying a home in one of the world's most transactional real estate markets. Dubai moves over a hundred billion dirhams in property every year, yet the actual process of financing a purchase. The paperwork, the bank comparisons, the back-and-forth with brokers who still operated on WhatsApp and spreadsheets. Belonged to a different century. Antoun saw the gap and refused to look away. He co-founded Huspy with Khalid Ashmawy, and what happened next is one of the quietest, most consequential proptech stories in the Middle East.
The insight was deceptively simple. Real estate agents and mortgage brokers in Dubai were drowning in operational friction. They spent more time chasing documents and coordinating between banks than they did actually selling properties. Huspy didn't try to replace them. That's the crucial distinction. Instead, Antoun built the infrastructure layer beneath them. A digital platform that connected brokers to over 25 banks, automated the comparison and application process, and gave agents mobile-first tools to close deals faster while earning better commissions. It was the classic platform play: make the existing players dramatically more effective, and they'll pull the platform into every transaction. Within four years, Huspy was processing more than a quarter of all residential mortgages in Dubai. Not a quarter of digital mortgages. A quarter of all of them. In a city where property is practically a national sport, that number is staggering.
The scale tells its own story. Huspy now facilitates over seven billion dollars in annual real estate transactions across the UAE and Spain. That second market is no accident. In 2023, Antoun made the contrarian bet to expand not into Saudi Arabia. The obvious MENA play. But into Spain, where fragmented mortgage brokerage and a booming expat market created eerily similar conditions to early Dubai. The bet paid off: the Spanish operation achieved twenty-times year-on-year growth in 2024, expanding from Madrid into Valencia, Alicante, and Malaga. Only after proving the European thesis did Antoun turn to Riyadh. There's a lesson in that sequencing. Most founders chase the biggest adjacent market first. Antoun chased the most structurally similar one, knowing that product-market fit transfers better than ambition.
In July 2025, Balderton Capital led a fifty-nine million dollar Series B, with Peak XV, ExBorder Partners, and Turmeric Capital among the co-investors. That brought Huspy's total funding past the hundred-million-dollar mark. Balderton. The same firm that backed Revolut, Citymapper, and GoCardless. Doesn't write cheques for regional plays. They write them for companies they believe can define a global category. "We are building a global business with the goal of being present in the majority of European and Middle Eastern cities," Antoun said after the round closed. It's a statement that sounds like ambition, but look at the trajectory and it reads more like a roadmap already in execution. Six additional Spanish cities by end of 2025. Saudi Arabia launching in parallel. A team drawn from over forty nationalities, headquartered in a city that itself runs on imported talent and relentless pragmatism.
What makes the Huspy story worth studying isn't the fundraise or even the market share. It's the mental model. Antoun understood something that most proptech founders miss: the homebuyer is not the customer. The homebuyer is the end beneficiary, yes, but the actual customer. The person whose daily workflow needs transforming. Is the broker, the agent, the intermediary sitting between desire and keys. Fix their operating system and the platform owns the rails beneath an entire market. It's the same logic that made Stripe inevitable in payments and Shopify inevitable in commerce. The model is not to compete with the merchants. It is to become the ground they stand on.
Dubai has produced plenty of proptech startups, but very few have crossed the threshold from local utility to exportable platform. Huspy is doing it not by chasing hype cycles or pivoting into AI buzzwords, but by grinding through the deeply unsexy work of mortgage infrastructure. Bank integrations, compliance workflows, broker tooling. Market by market, city by city. For a region that often celebrates the announcement over the execution, Antoun's company is a reminder that the founders who end up mattering most are the ones obsessed with the plumbing. The pipes nobody sees. The mortgages nobody thinks about until they need one. And then, increasingly, they need Huspy.