Maysarah Mishaal

What is the mandate of the company? 

trustangle was founded on the basis of helping mainly private and semi-government companies in their digital transformation. It was started in 2014. We have very selected clients who are aiming to do for digital transformation. From there, we are currently operating with enterprise and semi-government organizations to really take them toward real technological digitalization and adaptation. Nowadays, you need full enablement and business-understanding to equip the company in the proper way to digitize their business. This is where we come in. We operate all family businesses in Saudi into taking their multi-businesses, multi-subsidiaries across the country, really helping their economic growth with digital adaptation. We work with almost 60 to 70 international software partners. We do a lot of localization to fit into the Saudi market in terms of requirements and regulations. During the pandemic, our plans went five times faster than originally planned. We were expecting to put more effort into convincing the market. Now, the market is really chasing us to offer what we have.

How were you able to adapt your strategy to satisfy those current demands and necessities?

We had to do a lot of strategic moves in the company, expanding our offices globally. In the last four years, we opened in India, Egypt, and Turkey. trustangle has six offices and all of them happened in the last five years, allowing us to offer all of the tech and digital understanding to each region are present. We almost quadrupled our team in those three to four years. 

Who would you consider as your main clients or your main target sectors?

Today, we are focusing heavily on entertainment and PIF companies. In 2021, we did a complete digital transformation for Golf Saudi. In the last two years, we were heavily involved in the new hotels’ automation. As you know, Saudi has a huge youth population so the market is receptive to digital technologies. We are currently working on a lot of entertainment projects. In the last three years, trustangle focused extensively on hospitality and logistics. We have huge projects in logistical automation in the country.

What digital trends do you see impacting the hospitality and entertainment sector in Saudi Arabia over the next five years?

We will see a seamless connected digital journey at each stage of the tourism process. From booking your flight to picking up your car. Recently, we launched more than 14 digital parking systems in Saudi Arabia that offer a seamless journey and makes life easier. We are preparing ourselves to capture opportunities in the market in the coming years. Global companies are working with us, willing to come into the market. We help bridge international technologies to the local Saudi context.

What are your ambitions in terms of domestic and international expansion?

We work in India, Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, and Dubai. Those are real offices for trustangle. We heading to East Europe. There are a lot of talent acquisitions and growth. We probably will be opening an office in the Netherlands. East Europe has a lot of talent that could help Saudi growth in terms of their caliber, their involvement skills and capabilities. We are opening in Cape Town soon. The main reason is talent. There are different talents across the globe and Saudi needs them. We have other sister companies which trustangle incubated. All of these fit in Saudi’s vision for growth. One is called Jigsaw Platform, a digital platform for retail and food. We have tachyon hub, a full logistic platform. We also have a lot of platforms coming on the ground to really serve the Saudi vision.

What would be your assessment of that journey since you founded in 2014?

We thought we were starting a hard journey, that we would need more years. We started all of our solutions, digital and cloud in 2014. The government vision helped a lot the last few years, introducing a lot of regulations. All of those regulations helped us a lot more than what we expected. The whole market has changed. We started with trying to build a market and we ended up trying to cope with the market speed. It was totally the opposite of our initial strategy. We used to make a business plan for three years and now we arere changing it every six months.

What are your goals and expectations for 2022?

By the end of 2022, we are expecting many public projects to go live. By November 2022, the Red Sea project will go live, for instance.  We are heavily engaged with a number of these. We are really enjoying the growth in hospitality. We are participating in three shows including in food and hotels. Our focus on growth is in hospitality and entertainment. We will see a huge jump in the market. The main factor for our success is talent. We have a female workforce of 40% across all of the offices, 60% male and with at least 15 different nationalities.