App development drives much of today’s digital economy, and the sector continues to exhibit a significant gender gap. This gap is visible in the data. A 2025 report on global venture capital deployment shows that of the roughly $289 billion invested globally in 2024, only about 2.3 percent went to female‑only founding teams. In MENA in 2025, male-founded startups raised $3.3 billion, while female-founded teams raised $1.1 million across four deals.

By Christiana Maxion, Founder and CEO of MAXION

The disparity reflects how opportunities and funding are distributed. Startups often receive support through established networks, and these networks have historically favoured existing patterns.

Common barriers include a lack of female role models in coding and product leadership, which reduces visibility and mentorship opportunities. Cultural and social perceptions about women in tech can also influence promotions and recognition. Additionally, as shown in the data, women-led startups frequently receive less venture capital, often due to bias or narrower networks.

Building a scalable platform requires sustained investment across engineering, product architecture, compliance, security, and data infrastructure. It also requires capital depth long before profitability becomes visible.

Early capital defines hiring capacity, iteration velocity, and runway. It determines how quickly a company reaches product–market fit, how resilient it remains during experimentation, and how long a founder can refine before external pressure forces compromise. In essence, capital defines the trajectory of growth, its speed, scale, and sustainability.

While these structural and capital-related challenges are real, they have not stopped women from entering the tech space. Today, despite fewer traditional tech backgrounds, women are building startups based on proven real-world business models using artificial intelligence to scale the product.

Artificial intelligence has lowered the barrier to launching an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). Teams can ship faster, tooling is more accessible, and development cycles are compressed. Code generation, rapid prototyping, and AI-assisted workflows have democratized production.

In this environment, the differentiator is taste. Advantage shifts toward founders who understand design depth, user psychology, behavioural calibration, and long-term brand positioning.

Success in product design relies on careful judgment across multiple dimensions: creating a thoughtful user experience, designing an intuitive user interface, prioritising simplicity, exercising restraint, and making deliberate choices about what not to build. Each of these elements shape how users interact with a product and determines whether it delivers lasting value.

Building something distinctive now requires investing heavily in people and teams, not just tools. Capital deployed thoughtfully into human talent creates differentiation that automation cannot replicate. Tools accelerate output. Judgment determines direction. In a capital-constrained, AI-accelerated environment, effective leaders understand systems while remaining close to the user. They design products that encourage behavioural change rather than passive consumption and measure meaningful actions, not just engagement metrics.

This focus on execution and strategy is particularly important in regions like the GCC, where mobile penetration is among the highest globally and digital adoption continues to accelerate across commerce, finance, health, and social platforms. With infrastructure and user adoption already strong, the limiting factor for new apps is not access; it is strategic clarity

The next generation of dominant apps in the region will emerge from disciplined product strategy, not template-driven builds.

For female founders navigating a male-dominated sector, clarity becomes leverage. Understanding retention curves, lifetime value, capital efficiency, operating margins, and a disciplined expansion strategy strengthens credibility. Venture markets respond to measurable performance and capital discipline. Markets reward consistency of execution over narrative. They reward businesses that convert attention into sustained behaviour. But durability matters most when what you are building is infrastructure.

Successful apps and platforms address real human needs, creating systems that encourage meaningful offline interactions and long-term behavioural change. Designing for these outcomes requires measuring action, not just engagement, and prioritising long-term value over short-term metrics.