How has the company evolved since its establishment?

ABDUR-RAHMAN EL-SAYED Waveline Media is a self-funded mobile technology company headquartered in Kuwait, with operational offices in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and Turkey. We enjoy building beautiful, daily-use, mobile-first products that address a critical mass, solve a real need, and are scalable and monetizable. When we launched the company in 2010, we were one of the first technology companies in Kuwait. Today, Waveline Media is recognized as one of the leading tech start-ups in Kuwait and one of the most advanced players when it comes to mobile advertising. At the moment, over 25 million people around the world use our apps.

MAJED AL-TURKAIT Kanee provides a full range of human resources services in the market, including executive search, headhunting, manpower outsourcing, and training. In 2012, we switched to business support services outsourcing. This includes not just human resources, but also other support services such as call center outsourcing services, polls and statistics, data collection services, and IT. We offer a turnkey solution and can provide numerous services at the same time, including manpower, logistics, IT, and communications. We are one of the largest companies in terms of the number of curriculum vitae we have. Our clients come from the oil sector, the private sector, and the government.

How do you stay ahead with technology development and innovation?

ARES As a start-up, we need to constantly innovate to ensure that Waveline Media and its subsidiaries remain a market leader in the spaces we operate in and to create difficult entry barriers for competition. This requires a unique risk-taking and highly entrepreneurial mindset. We try our best to innovate and create new products to solve a problem in a new way or change the landscape of the entire industry. By conducting occasional surveys, we are able to enhance our products, offer innovative new features, and identify new ideas, hidden opportunities, and major challenges. We focus on areas that have not yet been addressed by the competition.

MAT For the last two years, we have been developing a new application to add value to the recruitment market and will announce the details of this in 2018-2019. I believe in digitization and know we have to develop the company by offering access to our services online, so this is what we are working on. There is no longer any need to have a large physical presence in terms of an office and employees. We will launch digitization and our business incubator in 2018.

How do your subsidiaries create value?

ARES Waveline Media’s first venture was Yabila!, which is a platform enabling businesses and shops to promote their offers and discounts to local consumers. The Yabila! app and portal were launched in 2011 and quickly became extremely popular, with over 500,000 people in Kuwait using it every month. In 2013, Waveline Media launched Nabd, a personalized Arabic newsreader that swiftly become the number-one Arabic news app in MENA, with over 18 million users today. Nabd has received numerous prestigious awards; it has won the Best Smartphone App in the His Highness Sheikh Salem Al-Ali Al-Sabah Informatics Award, and was chosen as Best Apps of the Year by Apple and Google.

MAT Our subsidiaries operate within several of our core businesses. Gulf Opinions is our statistical studies company that we created after doing our first census because we had the human capital and the bulk data. We currently have a huge profile in the field and have done some surveys in Kuwait for an international bank based out of the US. We are also bidding for that bank’s work in four countries in the GCC. Another of our subsidiaries is Gulf Contact Centers (GCC) and we have over 300 employees outsourced as call center agents. Of Kanee’s eight subsidiaries, the ones I expect to be most successful and where we concentrate our efforts are Gulf Opinions, GCC, and our IT company, Compucore.