We wrote earlier this week that the education layer at LEAP had no announcement of its own. That was true of the opening day, and it was the wrong place to stop looking.
On 2 September, on the main stage, Saudi Arabia's national technology academy held its annual ceremony and announced more than 250 new camps and programmes, along with new global partnership.
On the partnership count we have to be careful, because our sources disagree with each other. The Saudi Press Agency's Arabic headline says شراكة عالمية — one global partnership, singular. An English-language SPA dispatch in the same news feed says twelve. A figure of twelve also circulates via secondary outlets, one of which is a football site republishing rewritten wire copy. We could not open the article body on either language edition, so we are not going to pick a number. The camps figure is SPA's own and we are comfortable with it.
The number is not the point. The pattern is. Tuwaiq Academy has done exactly this at LEAP every year since 2023: Meta's metaverse academy at LEAP 23, the Apex ceremony at LEAP 24 with 12,000 graduates, more than 600 camps and programmes announced for 2025 at LEAP 25. LEAP 23 alone announced two new technology skills academies.
There is a structural reason for that regularity, and it took us longer than it should have to see it. Tuwaiq sits under the Saudi Federation for Cybersecurity, Programming and Drones — and that federation is one of the three bodies that founded LEAP, alongside the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology and Tahaluf.
The academy does not attend LEAP. Its parent organisation built LEAP.
So the skills layer was never missing from this event. It was in the foundations, which is a harder place to notice than a booth.
What Tuwaiq actually is
It is not a company and it is not a programme. It is national training infrastructure.
More than sixty global partnerships, led by Google, Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Meta, Amazon and Alibaba Cloud — the academy's own count, and one it has been quoting for some time rather than a figure struck this week. Over two hundred programmes. More than a hundred camps opened for registration in the first quarter of this year alone, across programming, artificial intelligence, cloud, cybersecurity, user experience, drones, mechatronics, data science. Its audience is deliberately wide: diploma holders, university students, university graduates, working employees, and school students still in general education.
Its stated target is 100,000 qualified programmers by 2030.
At LEAP 25 it reported an employment rate above eighty per cent for its graduates. That figure is the academy's own, and we have not found an independent audit of it, so read it as a claim rather than a finding. But even discounted heavily it describes something that works.
Then there is the part that decides the commercial question. The camps carry no fee to the trainee. On at least one programme — the Apple Developer Academy — trainees are also supported with a stipend, and the Human Resources Development Fund has committed funding for cohorts of trainees. We have not found evidence that stipends or equipment apply across the catalogue, so treat that as programme-specific rather than general.
Even the conservative reading is decisive. Your competitor does not charge.
The number that should be in every deck, and never is
We have reviewed a great many EdTech decks aimed at this region. We have seen competitive landscapes with Coursera and Udemy on them. We have seen slides comparing course libraries and completion rates against international platforms.
We have never seen one that names Tuwaiq Academy.
That is a serious omission, and not a cosmetic one. If your business sells professional or technical skills training to Saudi individuals, your realistic customer is choosing between your paid product and a free, state-run, vendor-certified alternative that hands them a certificate from Google or Meta at the end and, on the academy's own numbers, places four out of five graduates into work. No pricing page survives that comparison unaddressed.
The founders who do address it are not the ones who beat it. They are the ones who stop trying to compete with it.
This is a strategy, and it has a shape
Sixty vendor partnerships is not an accident of procurement. It is a decision about how a country acquires capability quickly, and it is coherent.
Training people on Google Cloud, NVIDIA and Meta stacks is the fastest available route from a standing start to a workforce that can operate the infrastructure being installed. It costs the state very little, because the vendors supply the curriculum and the certification for reasons of their own. And it produces credentials that employers already recognise, which is the hardest part of any training system to build from scratch.
It is also, by construction, a workforce trained to operate other people's tools.
We are not making a criticism. It is the correct move for the phase Saudi Arabia is in, and the sequencing argument is the same one we made about the gigawatt: capability arrives in the units it can be acquired in. But every strategy has an edge, and this one's edge is where the interesting companies are.
Where the market actually is
Four openings follow from the structure above, and none of them require beating a free academy.
Below the certified stack — but read the direction of travel first. We were going to write that school-age learning sits outside this academy's mandate. It does not, and the correction is more useful than the original point would have been.
Tuwaiq has run a specialised technical high school in Riyadh for gifted students, with the Ministry of Education, since August 2024. And ten days before we published this, it launched Albus with Google for Education, the Ministry of Education and MCIT: Chromebooks, Google for Education and Gemini into ten technical gifted schools across five cities, reaching more than 450 students and 100 teachers.
So the academy is moving down into the school system, not staying out of it — and it is doing so with the same instrument, a global vendor supplying the platform. The opening below the certified stack is real, but it is narrowing from the top, and it is narrowing fastest exactly where a founder would want to start: selective schools, technical streams, gifted programmes. What is left is the unselective majority — the ordinary classroom, the failing mathematics foundation, the student nobody has identified as gifted. That is a much harder business and a much larger one.
Everything the vendor does not certify. No global platform issues a certificate in Arabic technical writing, in Saudi regulatory compliance, in the specific analytical work of a Saudi bank or hospital. Vendor curricula are global by design; that is what makes them cheap to supply and what leaves the local layer empty.
The employer side. The academy's product is a trained person. It is not a system that tells an employer which of its four thousand existing staff needs which training, or measures whether that training changed anything. Assessment, workforce analytics and internal capability mapping sit entirely outside its scope, and the buyer there has a budget and a procurement process.
Selling to it, not against it. Sixty partnerships means the academy is an active buyer of curriculum, assessment and delivery capability. A company whose ambition is to be partnership sixty-one is in a much better commercial position than one trying to win the same student.
The asymmetry worth sitting with
Set two figures beside each other.
Global EdTech venture funding was $2.6 billion for all of 2025 — every education technology company in the world, one year, private capital. LEAP 2026 announced more than $15 billion in a single week, after $14.9 billion the year before, and more than $44.2 billion across the event's first four Riyadh editions.
The education apparatus running alongside it is public and it is not small: AI programmes in Saudi universities aimed at some 30,000 students, more than eighty specialised schools, and an academy with a six-figure national target.
And in the middle of that week, the most consequential education institution in the country was not a funded company at all. It was a government academy giving away Google certifications and paying students to take them.
That is the market an EdTech founder is actually entering here. Not an underserved gap waiting for private capital, but a market where the state has already built the thing at the centre and given it away, and where the money that is moving is moving one layer below, into the compute.
What we would fund
We would fund the company that reads that as an opportunity rather than a threat, and can say out loud in the first five minutes what Tuwaiq does and why it does not do this.
Concretely: a product for a buyer the academy does not serve — a school system, an employer, a regulator; a wedge the vendors will not certify because it is too local to be worth their while; and evidence of an outcome, measured on somebody the founder does not employ.
The third one is not a preference. When there is $2.6 billion of global private capital chasing this category and a free competitor holding the middle of your market, evidence is the only thing that distinguishes a fundable company from an interesting one.
Tuwaiq will keep announcing at LEAP. That is four consecutive editions of evidence about how this country intends to build a workforce. The founders worth backing are the ones who have read it.