Where the EdTech Room Actually Was

On Wednesday 2 September, at the Fairmont Ramla in Riyadh, Classera hosted a gala dinner on the sidelines of LEAP 2026 and inside the event's official LEAP evenings programme — an invitation extended to guests and partners across the technology, education and training sectors.

Fikr Ventures was there. The fund was represented by Ahmad S Abdo, Head of our Investment Committee, and Abdulhameed Al-Habahbeh, Investment Officer, who spent the evening meeting a number of the region's emerging EdTech companies.

We are writing this up for a reason that goes beyond a thank-you to our hosts.

Earlier the same week we had gone looking for EdTech in the public record of LEAP 2026. We took twelve MENA EdTech companies and searched each by name, in Arabic and in English, across four days of coverage. We found nothing. No product launch, no funding round, no company. Classera was one of the twelve names on that list.

And Classera was hosting a room full of the sector on the Wednesday night.

So the finding was never that EdTech was absent from LEAP. It is that the EdTech presence at LEAP was real, organised, and inside the event's own programme — and that it generated no press whatsoever. Being present and being visible are not the same thing, and only one of the two compounds.

That matters for every founder who was 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 organiser draws up for next year, or in the data a fund uses to size a market. The conversations at that dinner were the most useful education conversations available at LEAP 2026. Nobody outside the room can know they happened.

Our thanks to Classera for convening it. We have written the fuller analysis, including what we could and could not verify about the rest of the week, in our Insights section.