Happy Saturday everyone!

This week, the Arab world reminded us of something it does better than almost anywhere else: absorb a shock and keep moving.

A fintech sent the wrong email and owned it within the hour. A Dubai-based Venezuelan chef watched his dining room go quiet after February 28 — and is now turning away no one. A venture capitalist explained, calmly and clearly, why a $212 million Saudi grocery startup was always one bad quarter from collapse.

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Tabby's Email Blunder is the Most Relatable Moment in Arab Fintech This Week

For a brief, beautiful moment on Friday, thousands of Tabby customers believed they were going on holiday.

The email arrived with all the trappings of a dream come true: the subject line read "You won an Emirates voucher!", confetti emoji and all. Inside, a sleek graphic of a travel suitcase plastered in Dubai stickers, the Visa and Tabby logos gleaming side by side, and the words "Pack your bags. You've won!" in bold black type.

You were, the email explained, "one of the lucky Tabby Visa Card raffle winners" of a AED5,000 Emirates flight voucher. All you had to do was fill in your delivery details and wait for your prize to arrive in the post. Simple. Glorious. Life-changing.

Then, roughly 73 minutes later, a second email landed.

"We made a mistake with our last email."

Tabby, the Dubai-born, now Riyadh-based buy-now-pay-later platform, sent what may be the most diplomatically worded retraction in recent memory. The correction acknowledged that the earlier voucher email "was sent in error", apologised sincerely, and — in a rare moment of corporate self-awareness — added: "We know how it feels to be told good news and then have it taken back, and we take full responsibility for getting your hopes up."

They also reassured anyone who had already excitedly filled in their delivery address that the data "has not been used for anything" and would be deleted.

It's the kind of thing that sounds like a punchline, but anyone who has ever cleared a whole afternoon mentally rerouting a future around unexpected prize money will know: it's not that funny when it's happening to you.

The anatomy of a mass email mistake

These things happen more than companies like to admit. A test campaign escapes the sandbox. A segment filter fails. A trigger fires prematurely. In most cases the damage is a mildly embarrassing coupon code or a duplicated newsletter. In this case, Tabby sent an entire raffle-winner notification, complete with a "Provide delivery details" call-to-action, to an audience that had not, in fact, won anything.

What Tabby did right, though, was move fast and own it completely. No hedging, no passive voice, no "it has come to our attention that some users may have received a communication". Just a clean, human apology sent within the hour.

The silver lining?

In a landscape where brand trust is everything, how a company handles a mistake often matters more than the mistake itself. The voucher may not have been real. But the apology? That one landed perfectly.

Exclusive: Dubai's Empty Tables Are Filling Up Again - A Chef’s Testimony to Smashi Business

Thursday evening at the Observatory Lounge, Marriott Dubai Harbour. The terrace is humming. You wouldn't know anything had happened in the last three months.

Chef Daniel Gallo, Venezuelan-born Chef de Cuisine at the hotel, knows better. "January and February were strong," he told Smashi Business. "We beat budgets." Then February 28 happened.

The US-Israeli strikes on Iran triggered retaliatory attacks across the Gulf, 37,000 flight cancellations in ten days, and an airspace shutdown that brought Dubai International to a halt. For hospitality, the damage was instant. March and April were, in Gallo's words, quiet. Difficult. They stayed afloat somehow.

Dubai moved fast. Two stimulus packages, AED 1 billion in March, AED 1.5 billion in May, brought the government's total support to AED 2.5 billion in under two months. Hotels and restaurants were exempted from municipal fees, with the Tourism Dirham suspended for the period.

It bought time. By May, brunches were filling up. June brought full houses. Gallo recently hosted a group of 50 Belgians staying at the hotel. He's preparing for a slow summer, but expects full rooms again by late August. Industry analysts, quoted by AGBI, point to a potential Q4 surge, with major events pushed from spring into September through November.

The chef, who grew up wealthy in Caracas and watched Venezuela unravel over a decade, reads a room well. Right now, he likes what he sees as Dubai, one again, bounces back from adversity.

The Grocery Rush That Ran Out of Road: How and Why Nana Failed in Saudi Q-Commerce

For a while, it looked like the future of retail. Dark stores humming in urban basements, riders weaving through city traffic, groceries on your doorstep in under fifteen minutes. Quick commerce was the category that attracted billions in venture capital and captured the imagination of consumers across the region.

Then Nana filed for financial reorganization.

Saudi Arabia's most well-funded grocery delivery startup, which had raised $212 million over its lifetime, became the latest casualty in a sector that has been quietly unraveling for some time. To Khaled Talhouni, co-founder and Managing Partner of Nuwa Capital, it was a painful but logical outcome.

"Quick commerce is one of the most operationally brutal models in tech," Talhouni told host Loulou Khazen Baz on the With Loulou podcast. "You're working with margins of 4 to 15 percent, and you need everything to go right, every single day."

Talhouni, a veteran of 18 years in the regional startup ecosystem who now oversees a portfolio of 53 companies across the MENAPT region, laid out the structural problem clearly. Delivering groceries in 10 to 15 minutes requires hyper-dense networks of dark stores, significant logistics infrastructure, and near-perfect rider utilisation at all hours. When order volumes dip, even briefly, the unit economics deteriorate rapidly. There is no cushion.

Nana's particular vulnerability was its pure-play model: owning the entire fulfillment chain from warehouse to doorstep. It was an approach that demanded enormous capital and left little room to maneuver. Meanwhile, the competitive landscape was shifting beneath it. Major grocery chains, watching their margins erode, began building their own last-mile delivery capabilities. The platforms that had once seemed indispensable started to look replaceable.

The contrast with leaner marketplace models, like InstaShop in the UAE, which connects customers to retailers without shouldering infrastructure costs, illustrates how differently the same idea can be executed.

"The pure-play model was always fragile," Talhouni says. "The market caught up."

For the wider investment community, Nana's story is a sobering reminder that in low-margin, high-burn categories, scale alone is not salvation. A diversified portfolio approach, Talhouni argues, is not just prudent — in venture capital, it is the only rational strategy.

The grocery rush may not be over. But the road just got a lot narrower.

Smashi Business Exclusive: Al Haboob Racing Founders On Turning Camel Racing Into A Global Franchise Model

Ahmed Al Haboob and Safwan Modir, founders of Al Haboob Racing, spoke on Smashi Business about building the world’s first professional camel racing team in Saudi Arabia. They explained how they are transforming a traditional, individual sport into a structured, franchise-style model inspired by Formula 1, with teams, sponsorships and long-term commercial value.

The founders discussed leaving corporate careers during the pandemic to pursue entrepreneurship in a “virgin” sports market, despite high operational risks tied to livestock performance. They also highlighted media ventures like their Netflix series Camel Quest, partnerships including Paul Pogba, and their vision to modernize the sport using data and technology.

Watch the full interview here.

👨‍💻From Smashi Business’ Desk

• Emirati founded Saddle has officially landed in Qatar.

• Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi was spotted wearing an Iran national team jersey during Iran's World Cup match against New Zealand.

• Pavel Durov just accused Meta and Mukesh Ambani controlled Reliance of secretly blocking Telegram globally.

• The New York Knicks have won their first NBA championship since 1973, but the title run also delivered a major win for Abu Dhabi.

🔍In other news…

• Mideast Oil Boost Gathers Pace as Qatar Sells Crude to Asia

• Stalled subsea cable projects threaten Middle East digital ambitions

• PIF seeks EU nod to complete $55bn Electronic Arts deal

• Saudis Set to Restart Ras Tanura Oil Exports as Gulf Flows Rise

• Iraq Warns It Might Quit OPEC If It Doesn’t Get Quota Hike

• Dubai climbed to seventh place globally in the Global Financial Centres Index published in March 2026

• Ghosn says calls for his Nissan return show investor anger over results

• UAE conglomerate overhauls Saudi retailer management

• Dubai Holding seeks stake in UK data centre developer Hscale

• Promise alone is not enough for investors, says Mahmoud Abdulhadi, Saudi deputy tourism minister for destination enablement.

• Insurers slash war premiums for Strait of Hormuz ships

🦄 World of Startups

• Rentify Raises USD 2 Million Seed Round to Launch Earn AI

• CNTXT AI Closes $60M Series A to Deploy Sovereign AI Globally

• Blnk Raises $37 Million to Expand Consumer Finance Services in Egypt

• Saudi-based Pickappo Closes SAR 2 Million Pre-Seed Funding Round

• Three Dubai entrepreneurs have raised AED 10 million for DRBY, a startup seeking to modernise education payments across the UAE through a unified digital platform.

• Dubai-based Algebra AI nets $7 million funding to serve mid-market

• Moroccan Proptech Startup Agenz Raises $5M to Build Property Data Infrastructure and Transaction Tools Tailored for Local Market

• Calo, Bahrain-based meal subscription platform, expanded operations and full suite of services to Oman

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