Why I came back to Saudi Arabia to build an aviation company

My family nearly went to Australia instead.

I was born in Faisalabad. In 2010, when I was 12, we moved to Saudi Arabia because my father had a job here. The story I've been told is that the Australia papers were already lined up and he was close to leaving. Then a job came through in the Kingdom at the last minute, and he took it. It was nearer to Pakistan, and it was a Muslim country. One phone call, and I grew up in Khobar instead of somewhere else.

I think about that more than I expected to. Years later I made the same shape of choice. Everyone I spoke to said build in San Francisco. I bought a one-way ticket to Riyadh. My father picked the less obvious place to build a life, and I picked it to build a company.

I moved here as a kid, left for school, and chose to come back and build. The coming back is the decision I own.

The rule I run on

I have one heuristic that I trust more than any market report. If something already exists in the UAE, the US or the UK and it doesn't exist in Saudi Arabia yet, that's the gap. Geography lags. Good ideas take a few years to cross a border, and the person standing at the border with local knowledge gets there first.

I say it out loud because I could be wrong, and I've been wrong. More than once I've announced that nothing like an idea existed in the Kingdom, then found a funded local competitor within an afternoon of searching. Consumer AI tools turned out to be far more crowded here than my gut told me. So now I treat "nothing exists" as a claim to check by elimination, and I search before I get excited.

Aviation infrastructure passed that test. Helipads, obstruction lighting, airfield ground lighting: the Kingdom is building airports, heliports and giga-projects at a pace few countries can match, and the specialist supply chain behind them is thin. Much of the equipment is made abroad, in Europe and elsewhere. Somebody has to connect the buyer's specification to a manufacturer that can meet it. That was the opening I saw when I started Northlane in 2025.

The first order

The first real order taught me more than the business plan did. It was a single piece of aviation equipment, and it still had to be specified correctly, sourced from the right manufacturer, shipped, cleared and installed to an aviation standard. Every one of those steps can go wrong in a way that costs money.

What it proved was small and useful. A young company with no office could take a real order, sort out the supply chain and deliver. Before that, I only had a theory about the gap. After it, I had a reference.

I'd tell anyone else to value that first order the way I do. It's a small number. It's also the thing that lets the next buyer ask, "Has anyone like you done this here before?" and get a yes.

What the arbitrage doesn't give you

It doesn't give you speed. Saudi buyers move through committees, and the person you meet may be a champion rather than the decider. It doesn't give you relationships either. Mine are still being built, and being a Pakistani who reads the Kingdom like home but carries the wrong passport for the room has cut both ways. I know how things work from the inside, and I still see the place with an outsider's eyes. That mix is useful. It's also tiring.

The other thing the gap doesn't give you is certainty that you picked the right gap. I've picked wrong before, and ideas I was sure about have died in the checking.

If you're a founder looking at this market from outside, here's the cheapest test I have. List three things that work well in the UAE or the US and are missing here. Then spend a week trying to find a Saudi company already doing each one. The ones you can't find are your shortlist, and the ones you can find saved you a year.