Hamza Al Lawati

Founder and CEO

Hamza Al Lawati is the co-founder and chief executive of Wadiaa in Oman, founded in 2021 with Aju Samuel, George Philip and Mohammed Al Busaidi. The platform is a crowdfunding marketplace connecting startup and SME founders seeking capital with investors, built on equity-based crowdfunding with plans for peer-to-peer lending, and uses AI-driven credit scoring to enable financing for small businesses and support local economic growth. His background is in chemical engineering, and before founding Wadiaa he led multi-million-dollar projects in the energy sector at Shell and Oman LNG, taking part in the development stages of major projects including the Oman LNG debottlenecking team that increased the capacity of an existing plant. His platform works with local institutions to support entrepreneurs, including the Zubair Enterprise Development Centre.