We set out to answer a simple question: which education technology companies were at LEAP 2026, and what did they announce?
We took twelve MENA EdTech companies — Classera, Noon Academy, Abwaab, almentor, Baims, Lamsa, Coded, Nana Academy, Sabbar, Qureos, Maharah, Doroob — and searched each one by name, in Arabic and in English, against four days of the largest technology event in the region.
Not one of them generated a line of coverage at the event.
We published that finding, and then we corrected it within the hour — because two of our own colleagues had been in the room with several of those companies four nights earlier.
The correction, and why it matters more than the original claim
On Wednesday 2 September, at the Fairmont Ramla in Riyadh, Classera hosted a gala dinner — explicitly on the sidelines of LEAP 2026 and inside the official LEAP evenings programme, for guests and partners from the technology, education and training sectors. Reception at 7:30, dinner at 8:30. The invitation carries LEAP's own fifth-edition mark.
Fikr was there. Ahmad S Abdo, our Head of Investment Committee, and Abdulhameed Al-Habahbeh, our Investment Officer, spent the evening meeting a number of the region's emerging EdTech companies. Classera is one of the twelve names on our own search list.
So the honest version of the finding is not that EdTech was absent from LEAP 2026. It is this: the EdTech presence at LEAP 2026 was real, it was organised, it was inside the event's own evening programme — and it produced no press whatsoever. We searched for it in Arabic and in English and the public record returned nothing, while a room full of it was happening on the Wednesday night.
That is a sharper problem than absence, and it is a problem for the founders in that room. A category that convenes privately and publishes nothing does not appear in the coverage a prospective investor reads, in the sector lists an event organiser draws up next year, or in the data a fund uses to size a market. Being present is not the same as being visible, and only one of the two compounds.
It also revises how much weight the rest of this article can carry. We could not read an exhibitor list, and we now have first-hand proof that the press record undercounts the event. Read everything below as an accurate account of what was reported, which is a different thing from what happened.
Here is what was reported.
One product launch, and it sells school bags
There was exactly one EdTech product launch at LEAP 2026, and it did not come from a startup.
TETCO — Tatweer Educational Technologies, the Saudi state EdTech operator, a subsidiary of PIF-owned Tatweer Education Holding, which runs more than twenty-five national education platforms — launched an Education Marketplace. A unified digital destination for the student and family journey, described as phase one of a broader strategy.
The categories are school uniforms, stationery, school supplies, bags and accessories, arts and activities, with shipping across the Kingdom.
We are not being snide about this. A national e-commerce channel for school supplies is a real product with a real user, and TETCO is one of the more serious operators in the region. But it is worth sitting with: at a $15 billion technology event, the single education product launched by the country's state education technology company was a shop.
The same company's chief executive spoke in a session called "From Certificates to Applicable Skills: Competition in the AI Economy", where he said the future of education is measured by the skills a student acquires and how closely they relate to changing labour-market requirements. We agree with him. The distance between that sentence and the marketplace is the subject of this article.
Nine memoranda, no disclosed value
Everything else education-shaped at LEAP 2026 was an agreement to train people. We counted nine.
| Signed by | What it covers |
|---|---|
| MCIT and Savvy Games Group | Gaming and esports talent, delivered through Tuwaiq Academy and the Saudi Digital Academy |
| MCIT and the National Center for E-Learning | Digital skills and flexible learning pathways via the FutureX platform |
| Zain KSA and Nokia | An integrated technical, managerial and leadership talent programme |
| Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University and Huawei | Training in cloud, big data, AI and data networks |
| Al-Baha University and Fortinet | Cybersecurity training and capacity building |
| Al-Baha University and Huawei | Technology and innovation cooperation |
| Al-Baha University and IBM | Framework agreement on digital transformation |
| SDAIA and the Zakat, Tax and Customs Authority | Boot camps, workshops, reciprocal training seats |
| SDAIA and the Saudi Accreditation Center | Accreditation, plus training and qualification programmes |
Not one of them carries a budget, a headcount target or a delivery date. That uniformity is the finding, not an omission in our reporting.
Look at the pattern rather than the rows. Every one has an institution on both sides. Where a private company appears — Nokia, Huawei, Fortinet, IBM, Savvy — it is a technology vendor supplying training as an adjunct to a hardware, network or platform relationship. In none of the nine is anybody buying education software.
Three independent readings of the same absence
One data point is an anecdote. Here are three, from different sources, pointing the same way.
LEAP's own competition categories. Rocket Fuel, the startup programme, ran with a $1,000,000 equity-free prize pool across five award categories: the LEAP Award, Into New Worlds, Tech for Humanity, Shooting Star, Scaling Star. Taken verbatim from LEAP's own site. There is no education category.
The same agency, two editions. In the Saudi Press Agency's account of what LEAP 2024 showcased, "edtech" sits in the list of sectors between healthtech and space. In SPA's account of what LEAP 2026's twenty-plus tracks explore, published five days later, it is gone — nine sectors named, none of them education. That is the same news agency describing two editions of the same event, and it is not a formal track list; we could not obtain one and are not claiming to have read one.
LEAP's own archive. The event's content site publishes several hundred posts. Through 2023 there is a dense run of education writing — the state of EdTech, conditions for successful EdTech, reskilling and upskilling, a dozen more. Through 2024 and early 2025 it thins. The last one is dated March 2025. In the run-up to 2026 there is nothing with "edtech" or "education" in the URL at all. These are marketing posts rather than programme documents and the dates are modification dates, so treat this as corroboration rather than proof.
And an independent control: on the opening day The Fintech Times published a piece arguing that LEAP 2026 opened with a fintech track and no fintech news, with financial services relegated to supporting programming. A different publication, a different vertical, the same conclusion. Fintech had a track and no news. Education had neither.
It was not always this way
Eighteen months ago an education startup won the whole thing.
EduFi, from Pakistan, credit-vets students, pays their tuition and is repaid monthly. It took first prize and $250,000 at LEAP 2025, beating more than two thousand competitors. That remains the most recent education-sector Rocket Fuel win on record.
So this is not a permanent exclusion. It is a category that has receded from an event which has become, over five editions, an infrastructure venue.
The deals that did happen, and where they were
Here is the part that should reframe the whole question.
In the same week as LEAP, two real MENA EdTech transactions closed. Neither happened in Riyadh, and neither publisher connects them to the event.
Abwaab, the Jordanian learning platform, acquired Eduact, an Egyptian SaaS company serving independent teachers and learning centres with content, grading, payments and workflow. Terms undisclosed.
3C Coding School, in Egypt, raised a $3 million seed led by MRG Economic Group, to fund regional expansion and an AI-supported learning platform. It named Saudi Arabia as its next market.
Consolidation in Jordan and Egypt. A seed round in Cairo aimed at Riyadh. Both in the same seven days that 1,289 investors managing $14.5 trillion were in Saudi Arabia, and neither in the building.
What we take from it
Three things, and none of them is that this market is closed.
The event is not the market — but the evenings might be. If your customer is a Saudi ministry, a university or an authority, they were all in Riyadh signing training agreements, and none of them needed a booth to be reached. The one place EdTech actually convened at LEAP was a private dinner in a hotel, which is both a lesson in where the useful conversations happen and a warning about what happens when none of them are written down.
The vendors are the channel. Huawei and Fortinet signed with universities. Nokia signed with a telco. AMD signed with a ministry. If you sell learning capability, the shortest route into a Saudi institution may run through a hardware or cloud vendor that already holds the relationship and has no interest in building curriculum itself.
Do not oversell the region's weight. Global EdTech venture funding was $2.6 billion for all of 2025. A category that size does not command a stage at a $15 billion infrastructure event, and a deck that implies otherwise is telling us something about the founder. The companies we take seriously describe this market as it is — thin, institutional, procurement-led, sold through vendors — and then explain precisely why their wedge works inside it.
Two gaps, recorded
The Rocket Fuel Grand Finale was held on the final day and no result had been published when we compiled this. We do not know whether an education company placed.
And a report in June said HUMAIN planned to launch a specialised academy with an announcement at LEAP. We found no source from LEAP week saying it happened. We are not implying either way. If it launched, it is the largest EdTech story of the event and nobody has written it.