Buying a home in Dubai is, by any objective measure, one of the most administratively intensive consumer experiences in a city famous for doing things at extraordinary scale and speed. The mortgage process, involving multiple banks, a labyrinthine documentation requirements list, opaque fee structures, and a buyer experience that had barely changed in a decade, was, for Jad Antoun, less a personal frustration and more a market research brief. In 2020, he co-founded Huspy to digitise the UAE mortgage and home-buying process end-to-end, and the result is a proptech company that now processes more than 25 percent of all residential home financing in Dubai.
A Problem Worth Solving
Antoun co-founded Huspy with Khalid Ashmawy in 2020, at a time when the UAE property market was still navigating the uncertainties of the pandemic. The timing, counterintuitively, proved advantageous: as physical bank branches reduced capacity and consumers accelerated their shift to digital services, a fully digital mortgage application platform that could process a home loan without a single in-person meeting offered an immediately compelling proposition.
Huspy’s first product was a mortgage brokerage platform that aggregated lending offers from multiple UAE banks, providing buyers with a comparison view and a single application process rather than the traditional model of approaching banks individually. The simplification was dramatic: what typically required 10 to 15 working days and multiple branch visits compressed into a single digital workflow. Early adoption rates among Dubai’s large expatriate buyer community, accustomed to efficient online financial services from their home markets, were immediate.
Sequoia, Balderton, and USD 96 Million in Capital
Huspy’s fundraising trajectory reflects its product-market fit. Sequoia Capital India and Founders Fund co-led the company’s USD 37 million Series A in 2022, a significant institutional endorsement from investors with rigorous standards for technology businesses. Sequoia’s regional presence in the GCC, combined with Founders Fund’s long-horizon thesis on property technology globally, provided Huspy with both capital and a network that accelerated its expansion into Spain, an unusual destination for a Dubai-born proptech, but one that reflects Antoun’s ambition to build a globally applicable mortgage technology platform rather than a GCC-specific product.
The USD 59 million Series B, led by Balderton Capital in 2025, brought Huspy’s total capital raised to USD 96 million and funded the company’s planned expansion into Saudi Arabia, the GCC’s largest mortgage market, where the Real Estate General Authority reported 2025 mortgage financing of more than SAR 180 billion and where digital penetration of the home-buying process remains significantly lower than in the UAE.
A Quarter of Dubai’s Mortgages: What Scale Looks Like
Huspy’s position processing more than 25 percent of Dubai’s residential mortgage financing is commercially extraordinary for a company that did not exist five years ago. It represents not just product success but ecosystem reshaping: banks that partner with Huspy access a pre-qualified, digitally-native buyer pipeline that reduces their cost of mortgage origination; agents that use Huspy’s platform for their clients generate transaction speed advantages; developers that integrate Huspy into their sales process see higher buyer conversion rates.
Jad Antoun is, in several meaningful ways, a product of Dubai’s ecosystem advantages: a founder with global education and ambition who chose the UAE as his operating base because the market is large enough to build a significant company, the regulatory environment is supportive of fintech innovation, and the talent pool, drawn from 200 nationalities, is uniquely suited to building technology products designed for an equally diverse buyer base.
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Primary sources: the Dubai Land Department, the Department of Municipalities and Transport, Abu Dhabi and the UAE Government portal.
