Naif Alobaidallah

Co-founder & COO

Naif Alobaidallah serves as Co-Founder, Chief Operating Officer, and Managing Director of SDM (Smart Diagnostic Medicine) in Saudi Arabia, a leading Saudi company in AI-enabled healthcare founded in 2019 and specialised in AI-based retinal-imaging analysis for the early detection of chronic diseases. The company developed the SAARIA system, which has demonstrated more than 96% accuracy in detecting sight-threatening eye diseases and can identify more than 20 conditions from a single retinal image, including diabetes, hypertension, glaucoma, and Alzheimer's. Alobaidallah co-founded SDM with his mother, Professor Selwa Al-Hazzaa, a pioneer of Saudi ophthalmology and the first Saudi woman to head a medical department at a leading hospital, having led the Department of Ophthalmology at King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre for 25 years. This makes them the first mother-and-son team leading a startup within the Saudi entrepreneurship ecosystem. Alobaidallah brings a professional background in financial services and investment banking and oversees the non-medical functions of the company with the aim of developing a scalable business model. The company has conducted comprehensive mass-screening operations reaching tens of thousands of people across the Kingdom and partnered with a mobile diagnostics centre in Madinah to reach patients in rural regions. SDM is among Saudi Arabia's most prominent emerging health-tech companies and has been featured at major international exhibitions such as LEAP and WHX, with its innovations highlighted by the World Economic Forum. Alobaidallah is working to entrench a globally applicable model that places early detection of chronic diseases within reach of patients at low cost through artificial-intelligence and retinal-imaging technologies, in line with Saudi Vision 2030's objectives for developing the health sector and strengthening preventive care.