Inside Rabbit’s Saudi Expansion

In Saudi Arabia, buying insurance has long been a manual, bureaucratic process — fragmented, expensive, and largely disconnected from the digital platforms where people actually live their lives.

Masoud Alhelou saw an opportunity to change that.

Before launching Yasmina, he had already built insurance infrastructure at scale — leading the travel insurance business at Expedia from zero to over 500 million in revenue. Along the way, he saw what could happen when insurance met product thinking — and what it looked like when it didn’t.

Inspired by global players like Lemonade and Cover Genius, Masoud returned to the region with a goal: to bring embedded insurance to the Middle East. But rather than starting with flashy branding or aggressive B2C tactics, Yasmina took a different approach. One built on regulatory compliance, strategic integrations, and deep relationships.

The company’s earliest version, a direct-to-consumer home insurance app, wasn’t the breakout hit they’d hoped for. But the real opportunity revealed itself soon after: powering insurance from within.

Today, Yasmina is the infrastructure layer behind insurance offerings on platforms like Ejari and Syarah, helping digital businesses in Saudi embed coverage directly into the customer journey, from car purchases to rent-now-pay-later flows. It’s insurance-as-a-service, custom-built for the region.

This week, Yasmina announced a $2 million seed round co-led by Scene Holding and Access Bridge Ventures, with participation from Arzan VC, and the Sanabil Investment Accelerator by 500 MENA.

Yasmina is now expanding beyond Saudi, launching in the UAE by the end of this year, and Egypt in 2026. And while many startups claim to be infrastructure, Yasmina is one of the few that’s actually been built to handle the complexity, from regulatory approval to real-time underwriting logic. Yasmina says its tech can onboard partners in under 48 hours.

But Masoud’s ambitions go further. In five years, he wants Yasmina to become the region’s first fully digital insurer a kind of neo-insurance platform, built not just to sell policies, but to redefine what insurance looks like in the digital age.

I sat down with Masoud to unpack the road so far, and where it’s headed next.

We talked about how Yasmina identified the real opportunity in embedded B2B2C, what it takes to get regulatory approval in Saudi, how the team landed 12 distribution deals without a single salesperson, and why insurance might be the next great fintech unlock in the region.

Masoud, I’d love to hear more about what brought you to embedded insurance, how you’re approaching things especially in a Saudi context, and whether you’ve drawn any lessons from global players like Cover Genius or Lemonade?

I used to work at Expedia, where I was the Product Director for travel insurance. When I started, the insurance vertical was generating zero revenue. By the time I left, we had grown it to around 500 million.

That journey exposed me to different startups and ideas in the insurance space. It was during that time that I came across companies like Lemonade and Cover Genius. I thought: if we could build something similar to Lemonade in the region, that would be incredible. That’s where the idea really began.

I eventually left Expedia, still thinking about this concept, and joined Maersk in Copenhagen. I didn’t stay there long, maybe two years, but during that time, I was actively looking for the right partner in Saudi Arabia. That’s when I met Bashar.

Bashar is ex–Saudi Central Bank. He was actually one of the original people who helped establish the insurance sector in Saudi. Like, literally twenty years ago, there was no real insurance framework, and a minister said to him, “Bashar, let’s create it. Let’s write the law.” So he helped shape the entire system from scratch.

After that, he went on to lead an insurance company as CEO. And he, too, had been thinking about how to digitise the entire insurance experience. When we met, completely by chance, and started talking, he said, “You know what? This is exactly what I’ve been thinking about.”

So we decided to start something together. That’s actually why we called it Yasmina. We didn’t want to name it something generic like ‘Shield Corporation International.’ We wanted to create something human, like a friendly person who reminds you, “Hey Jamie, you just bought a house. You should insure it. Protect your investment.” That’s where the name came from: Yasmina. It’s easy to pronounce in Arabic and across other languages too.