FWDSTART PODCAST
Episode 07: Rami Tabbara, Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Stake

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[TEASER]

RAMI: Binance for crypto. Robinhood for an equity market. Why has it not been one app for the real estate asset class? Real estate is the largest asset class in the world. I see people buying stuff that was wrongly being sold in 2009. Obviously having some developers that didn't deliver on their promises. People lost a lot of money and that kind of left a mark on me.

Work-life balance is a bit... it's a bit... yeah, it's a myth. The first four people that we hired, we lost in the first three months. No one lasted a year. People have a wrong impression of what a startup is. What was the MVP like? Oh, shit. We've had apps been downloaded 2.1 million times. We have users from over 260 nationalities, 170 countries, transacted just under 1.4 billion dirhams.

And now we pay out north of 60 million dirhams in rental income a year. We're just scratching the surface.

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[INTRO]

JAMIE: My guest today is Rami Tabbara. Rami is the co-founder and co-CEO of Stake, the Dubai-based fractional real estate platform that is democratizing access to the world's largest asset class. Before launching Stake, Rami spent more than 20 years in real estate on the developer side across sales before deciding during the pandemic to build a new model for property investing with his co-founders Manar and Ricardo.

In this episode, we cover a huge amount of ground. We talk through the earliest beginnings of Stake, including their first MVP, which Rami describes in rather disparaging terms. The major partnerships Stake has announced recently, including teaming up with Property Finder and exactly what that unlocks, as well as their entry into the Saudi Arabian market, which is particularly interesting given the fact that that market is opening up so much in 2026.

We look at early hiring, culture building, and why exactly they're rolling out tokenization in 2026. I really, really enjoyed this conversation with Rami. He's an exceptionally cool guy, and this episode is packed with a ton of insights on all things real estate, property investing, and just the wider Dubai market generally.

That being said, before we get into it: Warren Buffett once said the stock market is designed to transfer money from the active to the patient, and Lebanese-American mathematician Nassim Nicholas Taleb reminded us that you cannot predict—you can only get ready. Those two insights define today's investing environment.

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They keep your fees low so more of your money goes to work, with minimums as low as $500. Sarwa is loved by experts, not just beginners. Whether you're a first-timer, an active investor, or a day trader, you'll join hundreds of thousands of users who choose to grow their wealth. As a Forward Start listener, you get $200 when you open a new account with code FORWARDSTART. All the details are in the description, and if you're chatting to the team, please do tell them that Jamie sent you. So what are you waiting for? Get started in minutes and take control of your money your way. Sarwa is regulated by the ADGM Financial Services Regulatory Authority.

The information shared in this segment is for educational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. Investing involves risk and past performance is not indicative of future results.

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[INTERVIEW]

JAMIE: Rami, thank you for joining me on the podcast.

RAMI: Thank you for having me, Jamie.

JAMIE: We were talking off camera briefly, and you've had a busy couple of weeks. I think it's fair to say. You invited me to the Stake Summit, which was fantastic. And I think we're going to touch on a number of different announcements that came out of that at some point during the course of this conversation. I don't want to just dive straight into them, but we'll get to them all in due course. Can I ask, do you enjoy those sort of in-person events?

RAMI: I absolutely love them. I think people tend to forget that when you're in the tech business, it's just your product talking. But I think when you're in an investment business where people are actually giving you their hard-earned money, they want to see the people behind the business. And every time we've done those events, it's been hugely beneficial. We learn a lot. We speak to our customers, we speak to our shareholders, we speak to everyone. And I think you can't get enough time with the community. So we love doing these events. We'll do a lot more of them.

JAMIE: Can we maybe go back to the start and contextualize things? I think at this stage most people know what Stake is, but at the same time it's better to get it from the horse's mouth, as it were. Would you mind just explaining exactly what it is, what you guys do?

RAMI: So Stake is a digital real estate investment platform that allows anyone from anywhere in the world to invest in real estate in Dubai, in Saudi Arabia, and recently the US—from one app, starting from 500 dirhams, which is around 150 bucks. And literally you do it in three minutes. You download the app, you create an account, you go through standard KYC, and then you can invest into income-generating properties, both residential and commercial, and start earning an income at the end of every month.

We've created this because we believe that there is a better way to invest in real estate. Real estate is the largest asset class in the world, and for a very long time, just investing in it was very archaic. It was not transparent, it was not digital. And if you look at other asset classes, they've really advanced from a user experience standpoint. You can invest in stocks so quickly, you can invest in crypto so quickly. But real estate has always been a clunky asset that people have had a very hard time participating in, not just because of the process, but because of the cost.

So how do you allow people to invest into this asset class in a transparent, digital way, but also in a very affordable way? We believe that people need to have real estate in their portfolio, and it doesn't need to come at a 1.5 million dirham price point where you go into debt or having to pay down a mortgage. You can get access to real estate in a very affordable, transparent and digital way.

In our part of the world there's a huge affinity to real estate. Your parents teach you from when you're young: when you make some money, put it into a property. Everyone's exposed to real estate. You either pay your rent, your parents have owned a home, so people understand it. But for some reason, no one's actually looked at it and said, okay, how do I make this a lot easier for customers to invest in it? But also how do you allow people to invest into multiple markets from one app? And that's kind of where we've really pushed the envelope, and we feel that there's a huge opportunity to do this and grow the business.

JAMIE: That's one of the things I found most striking, actually, moving over to the region—this affinity for real estate, which is so culturally different from an Irish background or perspective. Everyone here, I think even just from a literacy perspective, it's so much higher in comparison to us. Ireland at the moment is entirely primitive and extraordinarily difficult. And a lot of young people especially have been priced out of the market rather unfortunately. But something you said there—you mentioned earlier your own real estate background. Was this sort of a pain point or a problem that you identified while working in that space?

RAMI: Yeah. So I moved to Dubai in 2006. Quick background: grew up in Lebanon, went to Canada during the civil war in Lebanon and then moved back to Lebanon, went to high school, university there. High school was where I met one of my co-founders, Manar, and we've known each other for north of 25 years.

Then I came to Dubai in 2006, and I fell into real estate by mistake. It wasn't something that I had passion for. I literally came here working for a Procter & Gamble partner company. I hated my life in the first three weeks. I said, this isn't for me. And then a family friend knew the owners of a company called The First Group. They're like, hey, these guys are starting a real estate company. Why don't you join them? Walked into a two-bedroom apartment. And that's how my career in real estate started.

I stayed doing it for 16 years. Real estate marketing. Dubai never stops—even the crazy days of 2006. Even in 2009 when the GFC hit the market, you've seen it all. It's so crazy. I got exposed to the beauty of being in a place like Dubai: everyone from around the world wants to invest in Dubai. Wherever you go around the world, people want to own a piece of Dubai. I was in New York a month ago and literally everyone we spoke to was like, "Oh, how do I move to Dubai? How do I invest in Dubai?" It's just unbelievable. There's so much foreign capital wanting to be parked in the market here.

So when you're doing it for so long, you get exposed to different retail investors from around the world who really are parking so much of their hard-earned money into an off-plan property in Dubai because of a brochure they saw. And that was on the developer side, selling the dream.

JAMIE: I was curious about this. What exactly does that mean?

RAMI: So I come from a developer background where basically—for the listeners who don't know—from a developer, you're selling stuff that's off-plan. Off-plan means it's literally a brochure where you're going to build over a four or five year period and investors come and they buy into that property. They put down usually 15 to 25% down, and then the balance is spread over four years in quarterly payments. People who are buying that are just trusting the developer and trusting the images on the brochure.

I did it for so long. And I see people either buying stuff that was wrong from other developers or buying at the wrong price point, being misled. 2009 obviously happened. Some developers didn't deliver on their promises. People lost a lot of money. And that kind of really left a mark on me saying, okay, how do you prevent that from happening? A lot of people say, "Oh, I'll never invest in Dubai again, I lost money, the market's too cyclical." So it leaves a sour taste in people's mouths. There has to be a better way of investing.

And then I worked for some of the most demanding chairmen in the market—owners of developers who'd be like, "We're spending so much money on lead generation, but your conversions are like 1% in sales or less than 1%. Why?" And the reason is because you're asking someone to commit to a million and a half dirhams, and not everyone can do that. So that always left a mark, saying, okay, people love real estate, people love Dubai, people want access to real estate, but transparency is not there. It's getting better. But affordability is a big issue.

So that kind of left a big mark on me. When you get to a point—at least the way I see it—if you wake up in the morning hating what you do and not wanting to go to the office, I think that's a big calling to say you need to look at something else. I'm not trying to be philosophical here, but life's too short.

At that point, after doing it for so long—I can go on and on, but throughout my career, I lived in Nigeria for a year, basically selling Dubai real estate to Nigerians and West Africans. Then I moved to Moscow, lived there for a year, basically selling Dubai real estate to Russians and former CIS countries. I really got to see the demand for Dubai real estate.

And then at one point I said, I need to do something different. And my co-founder was actually bored of his job as well. In 2019, we started speaking to the regulator in Dubai called the DFSA—Dubai Financial Services Authority—to see how we can launch this business. Left my job in COVID. And yeah, it's been five years since.

JAMIE: What was the DFSA's reaction initially when you came to them and said you wanted to do this?

RAMI: It's interesting because they had the license in place. It had to be further developed. But they were very careful. And I think we're very fortunate to be in a place like Dubai because the regulators—people will always complain about the market, will always complain about regulation—but I think we have the best regulators in the world. And I know that because I speak to other fintechs in Europe, I speak to fintechs in the US. The regulators here are unbelievable. They really are forward thinking. There's always stuff you can complain about, but when you compare it to other regulators, they're very forward thinking.

And I think just being in Dubai—I was asked in New York, "How do you see Dubai?" And I said, treat Dubai as a co-founder. Because really, Dubai is a co-founder. They really are forward thinking, they're ahead of the curve. And I think that really helps startups. So all that backdrop that people—I see on LinkedIn saying, "Oh yeah, Dubai is not a place for founders"—I completely disagree. It's an unbelievable place and it actually challenges you to be able to go internationally.

JAMIE: 100%. I think from a regulatory perspective, it's just culturally as well. I think that's what I tell people the most, is that you nearly feel guilty if you're not doing something entrepreneurial.

RAMI: 100%.

JAMIE: Okay. So that's all well and good. How did things kick off then? You're collaborating with the DFSA. Where do you go next?

RAMI: So we got the license. I think it was the end of October 2020. So we launched the business. We started building the business out of our bedrooms during COVID. Dubai had strict lockdowns in the beginning. So literally out of our bedrooms—my co-founder and I have no technical background, like zero. And quickly we found out that we need a technical leader.

And this is really funny. So our third co-founder, Ricardo, who is an absolute beast—when we were interviewing, we interviewed him over Zoom, and we really liked him, but we just couldn't afford him. My co-founder and I were basically seeding the business. But he left a mark, and we're like, okay, eventually when we can raise some money, we really need to get Ricardo on board.

So yeah, we had our early hires. We put in some of our own money. Then we got some family and friends money. And we got the license in October 2020. Then we launched in January 2021.

Fast forward to today: over 120 people. We have over 2 million users. I was checking the number yesterday—the app's been downloaded 2.1 million times. We have users from over 260 nationalities, 170 countries. Transacted just under 1.4 billion dirhams on the app.

We pay out now—I was looking at it—we pay out north of $60 million of rental income a year, which is something that just compounds because we acquire more properties every month. We're live in Saudi Arabia, which is super exciting. And we launched our first US fund literally less than a month ago. It's fully funded now, over 2,500 investors. We gave them the opportunity to invest in a logistics fund in the United States, which was out of reach before.

I let that sink in over the long weekend—how the hell have we gotten to where we are today, allowing people to buy into a logistics warehouse in the United States on an app? So yeah, this is where we are today.

JAMIE: A ton to unpack there. Can I bring it back? So no idea what to expect—what was the MVP like?

RAMI: Oh, shit. It was terrible.

JAMIE: Really?

RAMI: Yeah. No disrespect to our early tech guys, but it was terrible. There was no low-code/no-code available at this point in time.

JAMIE: Yeah, no Bubble or anything.

RAMI: Exactly. It was terrible. It was clunky. But I remember at the time—you always say if you launch too late, then you're doing something wrong. And I was always aggressive that we need to go. We need to get in to get the feedback.

We ended up launching something that our friends and family used. But we got a lot of strong feedback. And then as soon as we raised the money, we realized that the current tech setup that we had wasn't going to get us anywhere. So we ended up calling Ricardo back and we're like, hey man, we need you. And then he joined us as our third co-founder, which was the best decision we've ever made since we launched the business.

So when we launched, it was bad. It was embarrassing. It's so funny—at our team summit last week, Ricardo put up on the screen the first version of the website. It wasn't even an app. And it was just... yeah, it was terrible. It was clunky.

JAMIE: Were you pitching with this MVP then to investors?

RAMI: Yeah, we were. And at that time we had put in a considerable amount of our own money into the business, which was nerve-racking in its own right. When you do it, you have kids, and it's in the middle of COVID, and there's so much risk. So we put our own money, but also we had some friends and family money that enabled us to hire talent. Otherwise, we wouldn't have been able to hire talent.

And then when we started getting some early transactions—I remember our first transaction that wasn't a friend or family was a guy, I forgot his first name, last name was Dooley. Lives in the UK. Put in, I think, 3,000 pounds. I'll never forget it. And I'm like, okay, we got our first ticket, first investment from—

JAMIE: How did he discover the platform?

RAMI: Through social media. Honestly. And it was crazy. I remember calling him and we're like, okay, tell me, how can we improve this? And he started saying, okay, this was clunky, this was clunky. And then we started—I started speaking to every single person who put money.

And then at that point, we started speaking to investors and we raised a $4 million seed round, which at the time was more money than we needed. And it was great because I said, let's just get more money because at least it gives us some comfort to make mistakes. And from a tech perspective, we still didn't know. And that's when we called Ricardo and he came in.

JAMIE: What was the process of sourcing those initial properties then?

RAMI: Begging my old friends in the real estate ecosystem—like, hey man, we've worked together for a very long time, I wanted something, I need your help in getting assets. Literally, it was begging. Because at the time, people were like, oh, what is this concept? I don't know if it's going to work. Sellers were not sure, of course. So literally I had to go to brokers that I knew from the early days that trusted me. I'm like, okay, just give me some real estate.

And we were lucky at the time because COVID—you know, COVID was a blessing in disguise for the real estate market. At the time, it hadn't picked up yet. So we were able to get really good deals.

JAMIE: Okay. So we're talking the property side. What about for consumers then? Because it's a big undertaking on one level—this startup you've never heard of previously—investing your hard-earned cash in fractional real estate. Probably a concept which many people were originally somewhat unfamiliar with. Like in the US, maybe Fundrise as an example dating back to 2010. But to that point, were you drawing inspiration from any other platforms?

RAMI: It's interesting, right? Because we get asked, give me a comparison in the US or Europe. It's very interesting. Our business, in our opinion, is very unique to our region. And I'll tell you why.

When you look at Fundrise, for example—actually, it's funny, when we launched the business, the founder's brother, his name was Dan Miller, we reached out to him, and we actually put him on our advisory board to learn from their mistakes at Fundrise.

But going back to where we think it's different: because you see, in the US, first of all, the regulation—going back to regulation—does not allow international investors to participate in the market. You have to have a Social Security number. You have to be a US citizen. So that prevents international investors from coming in.

Second of all, you have REITs there that are very common. And REITs work there because you get a tax break. And access to real estate mortgages is very easy to get there. In our part of the world, it's still very primitive. Difficult. It's not easy.

And the affinity in this part of the world is a lot bigger because people don't participate in the equity market as much as they do in the US. And that's changing. And there's a huge opportunity there. That's why you have companies like Sarwa doing this. So there's a huge opportunity there.

But I think real estate in our part of the world is a very different beast to how it is in more developed markets. So when you look at comparisons, we say there aren't really many. And Fundrise obviously did very well. But I think the opportunity in our part of the world is much bigger because of how early the real estate investment journey is, as opposed to other places that are more developed.

JAMIE: That's one thing that struck me most in the course of the research for this—there really isn't actually many international or global examples. I was really trying to scour the internet to find them, but Fundrise was really the only somewhat comparable one. And to your point, I think it's still a very different offering. Even in a European context, there's not many. So you guys were very much the first mover regionally then?

RAMI: And people will tell you, when there isn't another company or some other company, that means you're either crazy. And you should kind of copy-and-paste something that's working internationally. Or you're on your own journey and you figure it out. And I think we really stuck to that and said, okay, this part of the world is different. And I think what we've done so far is a testament to that. But I still think that there's just so much more we could be doing.

For me, it's—if you've built the technology, and I say this with full confidence, we've built the most advanced real estate investment platform in the world. I don't think anyone comes close. And I've looked at other competitors or other players in the same space internationally. We have built the best app for real estate investment in the world, but we've built it for fractional real estate. The thing is, that scales to full homes as well. Because today, whether there's a thousand people buying a home at 500 dirhams or one person buying a home, it's the same technology stack that we've built.

And that's why I think Stake for me is a real estate investment platform. You can invest fractionally, you can buy a full home, you can invest in funds. Today we want to be the go-to real estate investment platform in the region and eventually globally.

Because if you look around the world and the apps, you have Binance for crypto. You look at Robinhood or eToro when you want to invest in the equity market. Why has there not been one app that stands amongst those other apps for the real estate asset class? And people say, "Oh, because real estate is clunky." I disagree. There's a way where you can do that.

And I think we continue to prove people wrong by saying, okay, we were one city, one product. Now we're three different countries and three different products. And I think that's just the start because you can add so much onto it. People today sitting in Tokyo are investing on the Stake app, they're getting their ownership certificates, they're getting their rental income paid at the end of every month. And now from one app, they can invest in three different countries. So why can't we expand that to ten different countries? And why can't we expand that to ten different products, real estate products? So that's where our vision is. And I really believe that we're literally just getting started.

JAMIE: Yeah. To the point about the friction component—Ricardo's demo at the Stake Summit, as far as the deposit was concerned, was just the most jarring and staggering thing. He effectively put a deposit down on an off-plan property in the course of 60 seconds, which is so seamless and frictionless.

RAMI: Because I mean, the way I see it is, my son is ten. Will he buy a home when he's ready to buy a home the same way I've bought a home? There's no way that's ever going to happen. The way the world is moving with AI and everything just moving at a much faster pace—people don't want to sit down and go through thousands of listings and talk to thousands of brokers. It's just not the case anymore. And if you're not at the forefront of that, you're going to be left behind.

Now people are saying, "Oh, is technology going to replace brokers?" I disagree, it will never replace brokers because real estate still needs that human interaction and human touch.

JAMIE: What about real estate agents?

RAMI: No, I think there's no way that real estate agents are going to go extinct. People will say, oh yeah, technology will replace them. Technology will make a lot of the process streamlined, but you'll still need that human interaction. I don't believe that they're going to—you're not going to not need a broker.

And that's why we exist—because we're so complementary to the ecosystem. Today, that's why brokers love working with us. Because we source through them, we sell through our platform, and then we give it back to them to manage. And then when we want to sell the properties, they sell it for us.

We've been very fortunate to have some amazing broker partners that we work with. The top brokers in town work with us, and we love working with them purely because they're so essential to the ecosystem. They have great relationships with the real estate owners, and we are just a conduit for them for liquidity. And I give so much credit to all the brokers that we work with because they saw that early.

And I also give huge credit to—talking about how real estate is changing—look at Property Finder. I deal with them, and they understand that a property portal platform cannot remain a property portal platform as it is in its old state. It needs to be a place where people can transact. And people can do a lot more than just see a property and then do everything offline. And that's the essence of what we're building together with them. And I think it's going to be super exciting.

Going back to Dubai—this is the first time a listing portal, a real estate portal in the world, partners and invests into a fintech because they see that the real estate transaction can be moved online. And for us, that's going to be a massive learning for all other property portals around the world to say, hey, the classifieds business, with the age of AI, will slowly become irrelevant if you don't adapt to the new technologies and transactional possibilities that happen online.

JAMIE: Okay, we're going to get to the Property Finder partnership. Can we go back to the developer point that you touched on there? Was there initial skepticism from maybe the developer side that you guys were going to eat their lunch to an extent? Or not at all?

RAMI: I mean, people see us as a channel for liquidity. I'll tell you one thing that we never did—in terms of real estate, we stuck to this: if you had a property at a million dirhams where the valuation is a million and you wanted to sell it at 1.5 and you come to us, we will reject it automatically. We've now built an algorithm to automatically reject real estate that's overpriced.

And I think a lot of developers are like, "Oh, amazing. Stake—we can sell stuff at a lot higher." And that's why we haven't done a lot of deals with developers who wanted to overcharge investors. Because at the end of the day, we're an investment platform that people come and trust our selection process. They come to us for the trust and the regulation that we bring in.

So early on when developers are saying, "Hey, I can give you real estate and I'll pay you huge commissions," but when we looked at the price, it was at least 10 to 20% higher than what the market is transacting at—that's something that we'll never do. And that's come at a cost because we could have done a lot more revenue, we could have got a lot more transactions. But that's something that we will never, ever, ever do because people come to Stake because they trust. We're an investment platform. We're not a listing site. People come to transact in real estate that is at market price or below.

JAMIE: Not passing the book to consumers.

RAMI: Exactly. And I think developers see us—and brokers see us—as a new liquidity channel for real estate, for both sellers and buyers. Sellers now have a new way to sell. And investors today who are either priced out of the market or realize that, hey, I don't want to lock up my million into one property—I want to diversify across five or six, hassle-free. We take care of all the management. We pay rental income at the end of every month. I think it's a no-brainer for the market. And we're just getting started.

JAMIE: Yeah, that's something I was struck by at the Stake Summit when you were talking to guys from Allsopp & Allsopp and from Driven—what is the relationship like from a data-sharing perspective? Maybe you touched on that to a certain extent, but what sort of insights are they gleaning and vice versa?

RAMI: So they send us on average 100 properties a week.

JAMIE: Really?

RAMI: Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, we are now one of the largest buyers of secondary real estate in Dubai. Not only are we one of the largest, we're actually one of the fastest end to end. We transact in 11 days on average on a property. So for sellers, it's a dream come true because they're getting liquidity quickly, but also they're getting transparency.

Imagine you're a seller today and you list your property on a portal and you're dealing with a broker. You have to call them every week saying, how many viewings did I get? What's the offer? With us, what we're seeing is sellers—we only agree on the property, they'll create an account on Stake, and then they'll see how much is being sold every day. So that transparency is phenomenal.

JAMIE: Super granular in comparison.

RAMI: Yeah. I mean, they can go on the app and be like, "Hey honey, my property, our property is 50% sold. We're almost there. We're going to get the cash." So I think that measure of transparency is something new to the market for sellers.

So the way we work with brokers is they give us assets. They know which buildings and which areas work, which developers we work with and which developers we'll never work with. And they send us the properties. We've now fully digitized it. They'll go through our algorithm, it'll spit out the price and how many days we can sell it. We'll sign an MOU and—when you look at what we've done with Driven and also Allsopp & Allsopp—we're their top buyers of secondary real estate, which is phenomenal for us.

And we're literally—we want to be that buyer for every single broker in the market, as long as they can provide good real estate and good pricing and good locations and good developers. So they're sending 100 a week.

JAMIE: How many of those are you snapping up?

RAMI: Literally less than 10%.

JAMIE: Okay.

RAMI: Because a lot of the stuff that comes in—of course, sellers are trying to overprice, or there's a tenant that's paying a lower rent so the yields don't make sense, or the property is not in good condition. I mean, there's a lot of things. So literally less than 10% we accept.

JAMIE: Can we touch on Stake One then? Was that driven by consumer demand? Is that something that you guys just think there's an opportunity for?

RAMI: So it's actually a bit of both. Stake One is—for our listeners—it's on the Stake app where instead of investing fractionally, you can invest in a full home.

The reason why it happened is if you look at the market today, there's a $700 billion home market that's being transacted for full homes. So that's already a big enough market. And we feel and believe that we deserve to play in that market as well. So that was our first thing—eventually we want to... we've built the technology. As I said earlier, whether you're 1,000 people or one person, it's the same technology, same tech stack that users love.

I think we have huge ratings, high ratings on every single thing in terms of our UI/UX. So we said, okay, there's a market that we want to be part of. Let's do that. And then we started getting our users saying, "Hey, I've invested half a million dirhams or a million dirhams with you guys or 100,000 dirhams, but now I want to buy a full home, but I want to buy it through you on the same app. Same experience that I had on the fractional side." So we're like, okay, so now we have user demand. We believe that we should be in that market. And then yeah, it was just a no-brainer for us to launch it.

Literally, we launched it in the third week of October. We've transacted over 50 million dirhams now, which is small compared to the market. I'm not happy. I think there's a lot more we can do. But I think today—we started off with off-plan and I think we'll naturally move into ready because at the end of the day, people want a way to buy a full home. If you're sitting in Ireland or sitting in South Africa and you want to invest in the real estate market in Dubai, how can you do it seamlessly with a trusted brand like Stake, but do it digitally? And I think we're just really scratching the surface of what we can do there.

JAMIE: Is it psychologically a difficult thing to pull the trigger on such an enormous purchase? Part of it nearly is—you kind of want there to be a degree of friction maybe, because it's so much money that we're talking about. Is that partially what you think?

RAMI: I think when you're buying an investment home, it's a bit different. You're a bit less sensitive, a little more detached.

JAMIE: Sure.

RAMI: You're not going to be living in it. You don't imagine your wife and kids in it. It's just a moneymaker for you. It's an exposure to real estate in your portfolio that's going to make you rental income in one of the most exciting cities in the world.

Is it an easy transition? I mean, listen, Tesla did it. People are buying half-a-million-dirham cars online. And now you can buy a million-dirham car online. So why can't you buy a property online if you're looking to invest in it?

And I think there's a lot of investment money coming into Dubai. So it's not like we're reinventing the wheel. There's a lot of people around the world and in Dubai who are investing in real estate in Dubai purely from an investment point of view, not an end-user perspective. So if you think about that and say, okay, I'm making it a lot easier, a lot more transparent, digital, and with a company that's dual-regulated between the DFSA and CMA, we have some of the best shareholders that we could have ever asked for in the world. Most credible shareholders. I think it's a no-brainer for anyone who's listening or anyone who lives outside of the UAE saying, hey, I want a piece of Dubai. And if you want a piece of Dubai, you can buy fractional. Or if you want a full home in Dubai, you can buy it through us.

JAMIE: How important is having someone like Mubadala, for example? Does that help from that legitimacy perspective?

RAMI: They've been phenomenal shareholders. We've been very fortunate. We have Mubadala, we have Wa'ed Ventures, part of Aramco. We have MEVP, which are the OGs of VCs in the region. We have Property Finder. And then we have a couple of yet-to-announce large shareholders coming in.

They have been—I think we couldn't have been more fortunate. We have Republic in the US, we have Aljabr family in Saudi. We've had some of the top names believe in us. And I think when you're looking to invest your hard-earned money into a platform, you see who the founders are, but you also see who's backing that company. And when you have a sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi, for example, really backing you—they've been phenomenal since day one since they came into our cap table. It makes a massive difference.

JAMIE: Really?

RAMI: Yeah. It's huge for confidence.

JAMIE: Is the ambition global then? Something you touched on earlier is the potential. Why not do it? You can do it in Saudi. Why not do it everywhere else?

RAMI: 100%. And people say, what's your vision? Where do you guys want to go? And I think we want to be the Robinhood of real estate, but with Revolut's determination to conquer the world and how many countries they're going to be able to go into.

And the beauty of real estate is, I don't need to go to that country and set up a team and set up an office and try to start a company from scratch again. Today, we launched in the US by working with one of the largest asset managers there, Westcourt. They have $65 billion under management.

JAMIE: I didn't realize it was Investcorp.

RAMI: So the deal that we did was with Investcorp and we're going to be doing a lot more. We'll be announcing a lot of stuff with them. And then from there, we've had so many of the largest asset managers in the world—people who have billions under management—saying, "Hey, I have this amazing data center. I have this amazing student accommodation in the US or in the UK."

So for us, it's like, if we can work with the top names—we still have to have the power and the experience of underwriting those deals internally, which we do, and we're building that over the next 12 months—then what stops us from doing deals in Singapore, doing deals in the US, in Canada, in Europe?

And the beauty of this is we're doing it out of the regulation in Saudi. So we are regulated in Saudi by the CMA. And honestly, when we talk about regulation in our part of the world, the CMA—Capital Markets Authority—is one of the best regulators we've ever worked with. They're so forward thinking. Imagine—they're one of the few regulators, probably the only regulator, that would have allowed a platform like ours to distribute an asset in the United States through our Saudi license. It's just phenomenal. And I think this just shows you the power of the Saudi market and the region in general.

So we're thinking, yeah, if I want to launch something in Singapore, I can do that through my Saudi license. I don't need to go to Singapore and get a license there to do that. And I think that just shows you the power of what we're building.

JAMIE: And if you were to expand, where would the first place be? I'm thinking maybe—would the priority be, okay, we're going to offer our properties elsewhere in the world, but fundamentally the core consumer base is still going to be located here? Or would you be expanding the user base as well?

RAMI: So I mean, our consumer base is super diverse.

JAMIE: Yes, of course.

RAMI: And the beauty of that—the reason why we have a diverse user base is because we're based in Dubai. And as I said earlier, everyone wants a piece of Dubai. We're able to attract 170 different nationalities. So people are just interested. And literally now we have such a wide user base and people are like, "Okay, now I want a piece of the UK, I want a piece of the US, and I want to do it from one app."

That's the beauty of it. People don't want to have six different apps for what they invest in. And that's where I think the opportunity for us is. Do we ever want to go and have boots on the ground in another country? Maybe. But I think there's definitely merit in trying to stay lean and really work with some of the top asset managers around the world to distribute real estate globally.

JAMIE: Something you touched on there was the example of Revolut—the financial super-app. You mentioned Binance, Robinhood. It would be convenient if you could invest in all of these asset classes in one app. Has that ever been something you've considered?

RAMI: We've been asked that many times. Real estate is a big enough asset class. We want to be the champions of real estate. We've had so many people say, "Hey, why don't you start offering other asset classes—crypto, equities, the equity market?" And for us, it's like, people say, this is big enough. It's a big enough problem that not a lot of people are looking at. It's a big enough problem. It's difficult. Let's solve it. Let's do that and focus on that.

And I think one thing that we've been very good at is focus. We have a phenomenal team. Really, I think we've been very blessed by having just phenomenal people across all departments of the company. And they're so focused, so hungry. They believe in our mission. For us, focus has been the key ingredient of the reason why we've reached where we are today. And I think we want to continue to do that.

JAMIE: I can attest to the hard-working part, at least superficially, because the first time I actually heard of Stake was passing your office in person, and this was maybe like 7 or 8 p.m., the office was just full. I was like, what's going on here? These guys are either the most hardworking people, or Dubai traffic has really gotten everyone and they're just leaving it late.

RAMI: It's funny. We've been told many times—when people walk into Gate Avenue, we're always the only office that's always full. And I think when you love what you do, it's so easy. And the results speak for themselves. And I think we're literally just getting started right now as we scale this business.

So when you talk about team culture and team—we've really, I think we have something very unique that we didn't get right in the beginning.

JAMIE: Talk to me about that.

RAMI: When we launched the business, coming from a very corporate world—myself and Ricardo, you know, Ricardo a bit less because he was always in the tech scene. But Manar and myself—Manar was a banker at Deutsche Bank, which is very corporate. I was in real estate. People think it's not corporate. It's very, very corporate. And it's like targets and working long hours and you never have a day off. And it's just—if a client calls, you're gonna answer that call because you're commission-based. So you're always on.

When we launched the business, we wanted it to be like a cool, hip startup that—hey guys, drinks every week and ping-pong table in the corner.

JAMIE: Foosball?

RAMI: Yeah, literally. And a little bit of work-life balance kind of thing. And we hired people—the first four people that we hired, we lost in the first three months, I would say. No one lasted a year. But we lost people very quickly.

And the reason is because I think people have a wrong impression of what a startup is. And I say this: it's hard work, it's long hours, it's commitment. I think work-life balance is a bit of a myth. Because at the end of the day, you have to really build a business. And at a startup, the chances of you failing are a lot higher.

And people say, "Oh, it gets less as the years pass by." I disagree. You've seen billions of dollars worth of companies that vanish overnight because they got things wrong.

So we got it wrong at the beginning. And I remember speaking to a friend at the time who was a successful entrepreneur, and he was like, "I've known you for a long time. You're a workaholic. You love work. You expect people to be there with you in the long hours. Hire people that fit you, rather than trying to build a culture that fits people."

And when we did that, I think we got the culture right.

JAMIE: What were you over-indexing on initially? Did you have this sort of perfect ideal of a culture that you wanted?

RAMI: So yeah, I wanted people to come in and feel happy all the time. I wanted people to be like, "Oh, this is a great place. I can work from home and I can..." And by the way, we've tilted—we've still struck a balance. We found the perfect balance now.

But I say this—whenever I interview someone, I'm very straightforward. If you're coming here and you feel like you can't put in long hours and you're not going to be committed, this isn't the place for you. And I think really, this is why we've been able to have people around us—the majority of the team, the whole team that we have today—really believe in that. Because you'll always see, as you said, they'll be working long hours in the middle of the week. And if there's something that we need to do on the weekend, it's being done.

Because at the end of the day, if you want to create a big outcome for yourself, you can't have days off. You need to be on. And I think both Ricardo and myself exemplify that massively. We're always available. This is our life. You've taken a huge gamble, and there's no way it's not going to pay off. It's going to pay off. And we want to surround ourselves with people that believe that it will pay off. And those are the people that will succeed with us and will grow with us and stay with us for a long time.

JAMIE: One of the unique things about Stake as well is that Manar is your co-founder, but you're co-CEOs as well. Oftentimes investors will say, red flag—if you can't make a decision about who's in charge initially, what's going to happen when you have to make tough decisions? Why did you elect to go that route?

RAMI: Quick background. As I said earlier, Manar and I have known each other for north of 25 years. Went to the same high school. We've been best friends. I mean, we're basically family now. We trust each other blindly. We've been through so much. We know so much about each other that our wives probably don't.

And I think because we have that relationship, we've been able to be very frank with each other about what his strengths are and what his weaknesses are, and what my strengths are and my weaknesses are. And I think we complement each other so well.

When we launched the business, it was like, "Hey man, you're the finance guy. You understand finance so well. And you understand compliance. And this business is heavily reliant on compliance. I don't know shit about that." But I understand sales, I understand real estate, I understand marketing, I understand business development. So how do we complement each other?

And I think we've done such a great job in splitting our responsibilities, where if there's a decision that literally relies on the side of the business that Manar leads, or relies on compliance, I don't even get involved. That's his territory. And when there's a joint decision, it's a joint decision. And very rarely is there a joint decision because everything is so clearly split.

But at the end of the day, we both want to win. So we have the best interests of the business all the time. We have zero ego with each other. We can yell at each other and get mad at each other and really curse each other. And the next day, or literally on Slack an hour later, it's like, "Hey man, what do you think about this?"

And I think having Ricardo in the mix, who takes over another big part of the business, has been massive for us. And when people say, "Oh yeah, co-CEOs, red flag"—they're not the investor for us. We say, thank you very much. Because we complement each other. We've built this business being equally responsible for our areas. It's worked well. And I think there isn't any confusion. People come—if it's marketing or real estate, it's Rami. If it's finance or compliance, it's Manar. And if it's tech and product, it's Ricardo. And we've never had any issues.

JAMIE: Have you ever collectively, like fundamentally disagreed with the vision or trajectory amongst yourselves as three co-founders?

RAMI: Never. Always on the same page. We'll challenge each other.

JAMIE: Sure.

RAMI: I'll come up with a crazy idea that'll get shot down by Manar and Ricardo. Or vice versa. We'll always challenge each other. But our vision, our mission has always been on the same page. We've always been aligned. We've always pushed in the same direction. We've never had a disagreement about the fundamentals of the business, ever. And we're five years in and it's never, ever happened.

JAMIE: Okay. Two big things that we need to get to. And time is running out. Property Finder first. First things first: Michael Lahyani may be one of the most compelling and charismatic public speakers I've ever had the pleasure of witnessing. Second of all, how does this come about? Property Finder—what does it unlock for you guys? What does it unlock for them? What does it actually look like in practice?

RAMI: So quick background. Michael I've obviously known for a long time. He's been in the market since around the same time I was in—2005, I think. The magazine, wasn't it?

JAMIE: Yeah, the magazine.

RAMI: The magazine. He was here. And he's, in my opinion, one of the top founders in the region and globally. He's built a phenomenal business. We've always known each other and we've seen each other socially. And he's just an unbelievable founder. And we have mad respect for what he's built.

So what happened was, I think maybe a year into our business, I actually went to Property Finder and I said, guys, how cool would it be to allow your users to invest fractionally into real estate through us? And I still have the presentation that I put together back in 2021 or 2022 that I sat down with one of their product managers. And they're like, yeah, that's a good idea. But yeah... And they never came back to me.

And it's crazy because fast forward till today—lately we've been talking to Property Finder for six months now. And this is testament to their entire management team. Michael has phenomenal people around him. We started speaking around six months ago saying, okay, how do we do this?

And it came at the heels of them announcing their half-billion-dollar raise, which is phenomenal—from some of the top names, Blackstone and General Atlantic investing into a real estate tech company. That shows you the belief in the market here. Not just the tech ecosystem, but the actual real estate ecosystem. That shows you their belief.

And yeah, we started talking about how we can bring fractional into Property Finder. Back and forth, six months negotiation, and we finally got it done. They've come into our soon-to-announce Series B. And part of the partnership is now you'll be able to go to Property Finder and you'll be able to buy, rent, and invest.

And I think having an Invest tab is going to be really something that's groundbreaking, in my opinion. Because you have so many people who are window shoppers or studying the market and are now able to dip their toes into the market by investing fractionally before they graduate into buying full homes.

And we believe that anyone who gets exposure to Dubai real estate, whether it's through fractional or full home—but starting with fractional—they will eventually graduate to full. It's the gateway. Literally. And we see that on our product today. People who started off with 1,000, 2,000 dirhams and they've now graduated to buying a full home.

So for me, it's—you're adding to that ecosystem, but you're doing that transaction online. So it's similar to today when you use a credit card for Skywards Miles, you then go to your Skywards app to see how many miles you have. What's going to happen is you go and you invest, you get an automatic account replicated with Stake, and then from there you'll continue your investment journey on Stake. But you start off with Property Finder.

And I think it's just massive credibility and adds a lot of depth to the market.

JAMIE: Can I try and ask how it works from a business perspective?

RAMI: Yeah, I mean, they're shareholders with us. So we both have common interests in making sure this works.

JAMIE: Is that important?

RAMI: Yes. I think people tend to do partnerships with other companies, and those partnerships can die overnight because—

JAMIE: Potential to cannibalize maybe at some point?

RAMI: Was that a concern? No. No I don't think so. Because I think if you're a shareholder in the business, obviously now you're aligned in that respect.

JAMIE: Yeah. Potentially.

RAMI: When you're a partner, you might have differences of opinion and you might pull in different directions. And I've seen partnerships go wrong, I've seen partnerships that don't work. And I've seen partnerships where people give up too early.

Having Property Finder come into our cap table was something that was very important for us and important for them. And it really just made sense because at the end of the day, I think we see obviously the opportunity with partnering with the largest portal in the region and what they bring to the table—the branding, the credibility, the access, everything that they've built over the last 20 years.

And for us, we bring in—we're, in my opinion, the best real estate digital infrastructure in the region and globally, as I said earlier. So we add that mix to Property Finder. And I think it just makes so much sense.

I got a message from one of my mentors who's like, "You didn't tell me about this. This is amazing news." And I said... and he said, "The combination of Property Finder and Stake is one of the most powerful real estate combinations I've seen in the region." And I think that, for me, is something that we have high hopes for. And we're going to really push the envelope on what we can do together.

JAMIE: Something we haven't touched on is maybe competition. And initially, perhaps there wasn't any to a certain extent, as you mentioned—you were the first mover. We have had other players maybe come into the market now. What's your perspective on competition?

RAMI: Good thing. Yeah. I mean, listen, I learned something from Hossam Arab, who is another founder that I admire and I look up to. We had the pleasure of having him once come into our office in the early days and talk to our team. And I think at the time, Tabby wasn't even a unicorn.

And he said something because obviously he has competition. And I remember someone from the team—it was a Q&A session—and they asked him, "What do you think about competition?" And he said something which I say to everyone in the company today: Competition is good. Don't focus on them. When you're driving, you look at the rearview mirror a couple of times, you see what they're doing. But don't ever model your business based on what competition is doing.

And we're very competitive at Stake and we're aggressive. I think we're far ahead. Even when competition comes in, we're very far ahead. And I think we've created a great moat around the business. With Property Finder, that moat becomes a lot bigger. But it's a big enough market. As I said, the real estate market in Dubai is $700 billion. The vision of Dubai is to get to a trillion dirhams. So you're talking about a market where there can be many players, but we'll always be first.

JAMIE: So we've had a competitor come in who's been on the tokenization side of things. You have now announced tokenization yourself from Q1 2026, depending on—

RAMI: When the Dubai Land Department and the regulator, the regulatory authority, give us the green light. Then that's when we'll go live with it.

JAMIE: Why are you an ardent believer?

RAMI: So I'm a believer in making the transaction as cheap or as cost-effective as it can possibly be for the investor. And if it means setting up SPVs, then we'll do that. At the end of the day, we are driven by making it a lot more cost-effective for our investors. And with tokenization, that's possible.

I believe in whether it's on the blockchain—even if you told me today that if you can do it through an SPV a lot cheaper, then we'd focus on the SPV. So for me right now, it's like, how do we create a transaction that's a lot cheaper for investors? And it's tokenization on the blockchain. And that for us is what's driving us.

The technology is great, of course. I'm a big believer in the future of tokenization. You can't be in our space and not believe in how the world is moving in that direction. But in essence, for me, it's how do you make it more affordable to the investor. And tokenization does that. By putting it on the blockchain, removing the SPV and doing direct ownership on the title deed is just a more cost-efficient way to do it. And that's where we're driven.

JAMIE: How much cheaper are we talking?

RAMI: Not much, by the way. So people talk about tokenization bringing liquidity. I disagree. You don't have liquidity just because—you need to have that liquidity pool. But because there are no SPVs and you can transact directly on the title deed, then liquidity is easier. And the belief is, because liquidity is easier, there's going to be more liquidity coming into those assets.

It's cheaper because you have less SPV costs, which is around $1,000 a year. So it's not that much cheaper, but it's cheaper. But the view of it is that because you can transact faster on the blockchain directly under the title, it becomes a much faster process, which becomes cheaper for investors.

JAMIE: Will everything become tokenized in the future? Will every property that you offer become tokenized?

RAMI: It's interesting because when we announced tokenization—and we do user interviews all the time, of course, addicted to it—some of our users said that they still prefer the SPV. Some international investors prefer to have an SPV where it's under the DIFC law. Ownership is through a company, and people have a preference.

And I think if you are able to offer both, then you cover the market. Because not everyone will believe in tokenization. Not everyone will believe in blockchain. And we're fine. People should have the choice to say, hey, I prefer to have ownership in an SPV that is under international law in the DIFC, versus having something on mainland that's direct ownership onto the title deed. We'll always have both.

JAMIE: How will the calculus work on what property you decide should be tokenized versus what should be done via the SPV?

RAMI: For me, it's you give the option to the investor. So today the way we do it is we'll acquire properties—a million, million and a half dirhams—and what we're planning on doing is run a vote for our investors, saying, would you guys want this to be tokenized?

JAMIE: Really?

RAMI: Honestly. The whole point is democratizing it. The thing for me is, can you today grow the tokenization business faster than we've grown the fractional business? And if the answer is yes, then naturally we'll put in a lot more.

And early signs will show that... I think there was a lot of hype early days about tokenization, but people didn't really think—and we're seeing that from other players—they didn't think through how the ownership is going to work and how do you sell and what's the liquidity. And today in the DIFC, when you have an SPV, if someone passes away, you know exactly what the rules and regulations are. They're very clear.

When it's onto a fraction of a title on mainland, the rules and regulations are still being addressed right now. So we don't want to rush into something. We never rush into something where there's no clarity. So yeah, stay tuned, because in Q1, there will definitely be a lot more clarity on that.

JAMIE: That's super exciting. We were talking about things growing quickly—Saudi. If we can touch on that. I believe I recall, maybe it was back in May or June, you mentioned that the first month in Saudi was better than any month that you'd had in Dubai in the previous four years. Has that trend continued?

RAMI: Yeah, and I think we're gonna explode in Q1 next year. And the reason why is, for those of you that don't know, Saudi Arabia just announced freehold areas in Riyadh where international investors can invest into the Saudi market.

JAMIE: Is that massive for you?

RAMI: It's huge. And I'll tell you why. It's huge because we've been in the market now for a year. Saudi isn't a sideshow for us. We have a big part of the team there. As I said, I have a home there. I'm there every other week. My co-founder is there every other week as well.

We were one of the first platforms to allow international investors to invest into the Saudi real estate market, starting in January earlier this year. With Stake One, people can now buy full homes in Saudi Arabia through us in Q1 when they announce the freehold zones.

People don't understand how huge the opportunity is in Saudi Arabia. You have to think: you have a 30 million population and they've just opened up freehold to international investors. There's so much depth to the market. You have a huge local population. The yields are higher in Saudi. And I think there's going to be so much international demand that wants to park money in Saudi.

And why do I believe that we're best positioned? Because if you're someone who lives internationally and you want to invest into the market in Saudi, where do you start? You actually don't know where to start. Stake is a place to start. We've been there. We're already there. We're regulated. We have amazing Saudi shareholders. We just did a partnership with the largest Saudi bank, SNB—Saudi National Bank.

And I feel like today we have an opportunity that's ours to grab to say, hey, international money that wants to be parked in Saudi Arabia, come through us. We've already done over half a billion riyals in Saudi in our first year. We did a shopping mall, a commercial and retail plaza—it was 187 million riyals. We allowed over 5,000 investors to invest into that. They're earning 8.5% net, paid monthly. We did a full residential building that's paying 7.5% monthly. We did a development fund.

So we're just getting started in Saudi. The opportunity is massive. There's Vision 2030 and what the Crown Prince is doing there is something that's insane. And for me, the opportunity—we're just scratching the surface. There's going to be so much international capital that wants access to that market, but they don't know where to start. And literally Stake is really well positioned to enable that.

JAMIE: Okay. Let's maybe wrap up with: what are you most excited about in 2026?

RAMI: So much. I mean, we announced at the Summit that we're doing three things that we're focusing on over the next 12 months.

As I just mentioned, Saudi Arabia is going to be big for us. I'm going to be spending a lot more time there. We really believe that the next phase of growth for Stake is going to be anchored by what we can do in Saudi.

Obviously Stake One—we've just launched that in the UAE, and I think it's going to be a massive play for us.

Tokenization as well. For me, 2026 is going to be a defining year for us. After we announce our Series B and get that capital to really scale, I think we'll really take over more market share and continue to be the category leader in the UAE, but also expand to really expand into KSA and be known as that platform that enables international capital to flow into the market there.

And then do one international deal a quarter. We did our first US fund. And we want to do at least one every quarter that enables people to say, hey, I can diversify into different markets from one app.

So 2026 is going to be big. And 2025 is not done yet.

JAMIE: This is true. This is not done yet.

RAMI: There's three weeks left. I was telling the team last night, like, no one gets into Christmas mode yet. We have three weeks to finish 2025. And then we can go into 2026 running.

JAMIE: Last question—a question I ask everyone so far—is: who is one founder, operator, or investor in the region who maybe has inspired you the most?

RAMI: Hosam Arab. Just such an unbelievable founder that's super humble, that has built the most successful tech business in our part of the world. And I think he's literally just getting started. He's onto some phenomenal things. And I think we're going to be talking about Hosam for years to come.

JAMIE: Rami, thank you so much for your time.

RAMI: Thanks a lot, Jamie. Appreciate it for having me. Take care.

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