The McKinsey Consultant Who Built the Card the Gulf Never Had

The corporate card didn't work. Parthi Duraisamy, an engagement manager at McKinsey's Dubai office, covered the bill personally and added the receipt to that weekend's queue. This had long since stopped being worth remarking on. The American Express his firm issued for client travel and business entertainment was a well-regarded card in every other market the firm operated in. In the Gulf, it was rarely accepted. "It was a constant pain," Duraisamy would later say. "I'd spend my weekends uploading receipts, reconciling every expense manually." He was not yet building a company. He was accumulating, without quite naming it, a precise map of where the system stopped working.

The Engineer Who Learned to Read the Infrastructure Gap

The career that brought Duraisamy to that consulting office started with a scholarship. He grew up in India in a household where neither parent had completed secondary school. In 2005, he won a full scholarship to the National University of Singapore to study electrical engineering. He graduated with honours.

From Singapore he moved to Germany: two years as a software engineer at Airbus. Then London, then Dubai: seven years at Barclays Investment Bank, rising from analyst to assistant vice president. In 2014, mid-career, he enrolled at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth for an MBA. He graduated in 2016 and joined McKinsey, eventually posting to the Dubai office.

Each institution in that sequence was, among other things, a model of how financial infrastructure works when it is built well. Barclays had card programmes, FX rails, and payments operations designed for the markets that created them. McKinsey served clients who depended on all of it. What every one of those institutions shared was a founding assumption: the infrastructure functioned best where it had been built first. The American corporate card was an American product. In the Gulf, international meant sometimes accepted.

What Duraisamy accumulated over fifteen years, without quite naming it, was a map of everywhere the system stopped working. He was not the first person in Dubai to notice the expense report problem. Every consultant, every startup employee, every finance manager in the Gulf had the same weekend queue. The difference was that Duraisamy had spent long enough inside global financial institutions to understand not just that the problem existed, but what it would actually take to fix it.

The Card Nobody Wanted to Build

In 2021, Duraisamy left McKinsey. His co-founder was Karun Kurien, also a former McKinsey consultant, who would lead product and technology at the new company. They named it Alaan: the Arabic word for "now."

The GCC corporate card market had been examined by well-capitalised fintechs and passed on. Brex had built for the US. Pleo for Europe. Revolut had gone global but had not localised for Gulf corporate compliance requirements. The conventional analysis was accurate: merchant acceptance infrastructure was limited, UAE regulatory frameworks were specific and complex, and most SMEs in the region still ran their finances on personal cards and post-dated cheques. The total addressable market, by Western venture capital estimates, was too small and too demanding for the return.

Duraisamy's read was different. The complexity was not a reason to stay out. It was the reason no one had entered seriously. Every requirement that made the market hard to serve from outside (WPS payroll filing, UAE-specific VAT reporting, Arabic-language interfaces, local card network integrations) was a compliance layer that a global platform would have to retrofit after launch. Alaan would build it before its first customer signed up.

The compliance layer that made the market look too hard to enter was, from inside the market, simply the product specification.

They raised a $2.5 million seed in 2021, led by 468 Capital, Global Founders Capital, and Presight Capital, and spent the stealth period constructing the infrastructure. Alaan emerged from stealth in March 2022 and launched its product that August, already handling the compliance layers every global competitor had deferred. Y Combinator followed, selecting Alaan for its Winter 2023 batch and backing a $4.5 million pre-Series A in January 2023. By early 2023, more than 100 UAE businesses had onboarded.

The Compliance Layer as Moat

The early growth numbers did not match the market sizing that had led global fintechs to look elsewhere. Alaan reported average monthly growth of 500% across 2022. Net revenue grew 9x in 2023, then 6x in 2024. The company crossed $10 million in annual revenue and reached profitability, spending $5 million to generate that $10 million: a capital efficiency that most venture-backed fintechs take a decade to find, if they find it at all.

By August 2025, Alaan had processed more than 2.5 million transactions for more than 1,500 finance teams, including enterprise clients such as G42, Careem, Tabby, and Lulu Group. Peak XV Partners led a $48 million Series A that month, bringing total funding to $55 million. It was among the largest Series A rounds in MENA fintech history.

The compliance layer that had appeared to be a cost of entry turned out to be a barrier to entry. A global card platform arriving in the UAE market in 2024 or 2025 could not purchase WPS integration or Arabic-language OCR receipt processing off the shelf. These were years of regulatory work, local partnership-building, and system integration that Alaan had completed while it was still building its first product. Every month that elapsed widened the gap between what Alaan had already done and what any inbound competitor would need to do.

In early 2025, Alaan expanded into Saudi Arabia. Transaction volumes doubled month-on-month for six consecutive months. The compliance-first thesis held in a new market: the region that appeared too regulatory-dense to enter was, in practice, waiting for the product that took those requirements seriously.

On March 26, 2026, Alaan launched Alaan Sawa, pledging AED 3 million to cover utility and telecom bills for up to 1,000 UAE SMEs, offering up to AED 3,000 per business across DEWA, SEWA, du, and Etisalat over three months. "Alaan Sawa is a way for us to step in where it matters," Duraisamy said at the launch, "by covering essential costs and making it easier for businesses to support each other." The move from spend management tool to embedded business infrastructure was the continuation of a logic that had been present since the beginning.

What the Invisible Market Always Teaches

The structural pattern in Alaan's trajectory is precise enough to be portable. A global fintech estimates a market, finds it too complex and too small by the metrics it applies from a distance, and decides not to enter. The decision is made by people who have not run the actual workflows of businesses in that market. The market does not improve in their absence. It continues running on workarounds: personal cards, manual reconciliation, expense reports filed on weekends. Every business inside that market absorbs the friction as a fixed cost of operating in the region, because nobody has ever provided an alternative.

The opportunity that looks invisible from outside is perfectly clear from within. The founder who has spent years inside the workaround sees it not as a market gap but as an operational fact: this is the thing that takes thirty minutes and should take thirty seconds, in every company, every week.

Duraisamy's advantage over the teams that had looked at this market and moved on was not analytical. It was experiential. Years of filing expense reports in Dubai gave him something a market sizing exercise cannot produce: an exact specification of what the product needed to do. The compliance layer that global fintechs treated as a moat protecting incumbents turned out to be the moat protecting Alaan. They built it first. The next company to try will build it second.