Farid Academy Targets Saudi Expansion with SAR 4.5M Edtech Partnership

Egyptian edtech startup Farid Academy has set its sights firmly on Saudi Arabia, opening a central operations office in Riyadh as part of a wider regional push. The move comes on the heels of a $250,000 pre-seed raise last year, with a fresh seed round pencilled in for late 2025. For a company barely founded in 2024, that’s a pretty punchy timeline.

At the heart of Farid’s model is something you don’t see every day in MENA’s edtech space: live, one-to-one sessions dedicated to mental health and character development for children as young as three, all the way up to teens and young adults at 18. It also flips the script by training older students and graduates to become certified coaches in this very methodology. I’ve seen countless pitching decks that wax lyrical about “innovation in education,” but in this case, it feels spot on.

The real headline, though, is Farid’s new three-year tie-up with the Amad Association for Human Capacity Development, valued at SAR 4.5 million. Through the partnership, the aim is to equip 500 Saudi university graduates with coaching certifications while reaching more than 4,000 children and young people with programmes focused on critical thinking, entrepreneurship, and character building. To sweeten the deal for families, discounts of up to 25% are being added on the cost of official courses.

And it’s not just lip service—over 48 specialised workshops are slated, backed by a framework to actually measure the social and educational outcomes. That bit caught my eye, since in this region we’ve all seen plenty of flashy initiatives that start strong but fizzle out due to lack of follow-through. Having a proper impact assessment in place is half the battle.

Mahmoud Hussein, Farid’s co-founder and CEO, has called the deal a “transformational milestone,” tying it into what he’s named the “Farid 2030” vision: certifying 10,000 trainers and empowering 10 million children and youth across the Arab world. Lofty? Yes. But frankly, that’s the kind of ambition that sticks in people’s minds. Amal bint Abdulaziz Ajlan Al-Ajlan, who chairs Amad Association, has also stressed how this could become a breakthrough for the nonprofit sector, dovetailing neatly with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 drive to put youth at the centre of its development plan.

When I think back to some of the training bootcamps I’ve attended in Cairo—it was often a bit of a faff with too many workshops lacking structure—I can see why initiatives like this matter. Done well, they might finally bridge the gap between youthful energy and practical skills. And believe it or not, those often-overlooked “soft” areas like personality development or mental wellbeing can be the glue that holds the whole system together.

I reckon Farid’s choice to plant its flag in Saudi Arabia makes sense. With the Kingdom channelling serious resources into human capital, if there was ever a time to test the waters, it’s now. Whether they manage to hit their ambitious milestones, we’ll see. But for now, the startup has certainly put down a clear marker—one that aligns ambition with action, even if the journey from Cairo to Riyadh won’t be a straight road. And to borrow a well-known saying, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating.

For us at Arageek, who spend time around founders and youth programs, it’s hard not to feel a little chuffed to bits when a homegrown startup dares to scale big in the region. It’s exactly the kind of story that shows dreams here are no longer confined by borders.

👉 Everything else remains as above.

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