I started Skimbox because I was tired of watching good ideas get stuck in agencies that did not care if they shipped. That is the whole origin story, said honestly. Everything else, the offices, the funding, the Nasr Capital deal, the SUI reserve, came later. The first thing was the frustration.
I have been writing this note for about three months in scraps. Notes on my phone at 2am after a call with a client in Riyadh. A paragraph in a Notion doc on a Tuesday in Bengaluru. A voice memo to myself walking past the Burj on the way back from a meeting that did not go well. What you are reading is the cleaned-up version. I wanted to put it down properly because we changed a lot in 2025 and 2026, and I owe a clearer explanation than what fits on a homepage.
If you have been following Skimbox for a while, some of this you already know. If you are new, the short version is this. We are a technology consultancy. We have offices in Dubai and Bengaluru. We are backed by Nasr Capital. We build serious software for serious operators. And we are unusual in a couple of ways that I will get to below.
Where this started
The first version of Skimbox was an agency. We built websites. We built apps. We took almost every brief that came in for the first two years because that is what you do when you are figuring out whether the business is real. We learned a lot. We also took on a lot of work that, looking back, I would not take today.
The turning point was a six-month stretch in 2024 where two clients in a row asked us to rebuild their products to look like a competitor. Same layout. Same flow. Different logo. I remember sitting in a coffee shop in Karama with one of those briefs open on my laptop, and thinking, very clearly, that I did not want to spend the next decade doing this. It was the first time I really understood that the difference between an agency and a consultancy is not the price tag. It is whether you are willing to push back.
The moment we changed
August 2025 is the date I will give you if you ask when Skimbox became a consultancy. That month we put out a new positioning, we updated the contracts, and we turned down our first three briefs in a row for the same reason. The reason was always some version of, the client has not done the thinking yet, and they want us to skip past it to delivery.
Revenue dipped for a quarter. I will not pretend it did not. Cash got tight. I had a couple of conversations with my co-founders that were not fun. But by November the pipeline was full again, and this time it was full of the work I actually wanted us to be doing. Operations transformation. Blockchain infrastructure. AI features inside products that already worked. Real questions with real budgets behind them.
Around the same time, Nasr Capital approached us. They had been watching the digital asset space in the region and they wanted a technology partner with senior delivery capacity. We closed the deal in late 2025. They took a controlling stake. I kept the operating role and the technical direction. It is the cleanest version of a strategic acquisition I have seen, which is a phrase I would have laughed at three years ago.
What we got wrong
I want to be honest about this part because every founder note skips it.
We hired too fast in 2023. We took our headcount from eight to twenty-six in nine months and the quality of our output dropped, not because the new people were bad, but because we did not have the systems to onboard them properly. We had to let some of them go in early 2024 and that is a thing I still think about.
We also spent too long doing fixed-bid work for clients who were not ready. Fixed bids reward optimism. They punish honesty. The honest answer on most software projects is, the spec is going to change, so let us agree on a way to handle that. Fixed bids do not let you say that.
And we underinvested in our own products for the first five years. I tell every founder I mentor now to keep a small product bet running alongside the services work, even when it feels like a distraction. The product muscle is different from the services muscle, and you do not build it by accident.
What we got right
A few things.
We hired senior. Most of our team has 10 plus years of experience. That number went up, not down, after the Nasr Capital deal, which is unusual. Most companies dilute seniority when they scale. We did the opposite on purpose.
We picked WeWork over a private office. People made fun of me for this at first. The reason was simple. I wanted to be in a building with other operators, not a building with my own logo on the wall. Bengaluru and Dubai both. The cost is higher per square foot. The compounding value of running into another founder on the way to the coffee machine is much higher.
We started a small strategic reserve. A position in SUI, a position in BTC, and a small allocation to physical gold. None of it is large. The point is alignment. We tell clients to think in five-year arcs, so our balance sheet should reflect that, not just sit in a current account.
And we moved our core infrastructure to Mumbai in March 2026. Boring decision. Big impact. Latency to the GCC dropped, our cost base dropped, and we got a closer working relationship with the team running our hardware. We kept a CDN edge in the UAE for compliance and speed.
What I believe about the UAE and the wider GCC
This is where I have a slightly contrarian view.
The UAE market is not one market. It is at least five overlapping markets. Government and quasi-government. Family offices. Free zone SMEs. Multinational regional HQs. And founder-led startups. Each one buys software differently. Each one has different timelines, different risk appetites, different vocabularies. The mistake almost every external consultancy makes is treating Dubai as a single buyer. You sell to a family office the way you would sell to a free zone SME and you will lose the deal before you have finished the second meeting.
The other thing I believe is that the GCC is going to produce real software companies in the next decade, not just import them. The capital is here. The talent is increasingly here. The political will is here. The piece that is missing is the senior operating bench, and that is the piece we are trying to be useful for. Not by writing strategy decks. By sitting next to founders and building the thing. The UAE software consulting market is sitting at roughly USD 2.5 billion right now, and the IT consulting slice alone crossed USD 180 million in 2025. The growth rate is real, but the quality of delivery in the region is uneven. That gap is the opportunity.
I also think the conversation about AI in the region has gotten louder than the actual deployment. Plenty of clients ask us to add AI to a workflow and when we dig in, the underlying process is not documented, the data is sitting in three different SaaS tools that do not talk to each other, and there is no owner for the output. Fix the boring stuff first. The AI layer becomes obvious once the substrate underneath it is clean.
Where we are now
Around 60 people across Dubai and Bengaluru. Active engagements in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, India, and one client in the UK. Backed by Nasr Capital. Two internal products in early-stage development that I am not ready to talk about yet. A small treasury reserve. A team I am proud of. A client list that I would put up against any consultancy in the region of our size.
What's next
Three things I will commit to in writing.
First, we are going to expand carefully. We have turned down two acquisition offers this year for smaller agencies because the cultural fit was not there. We will keep turning them down until we find one that is.
Second, we are going to ship at least one of our internal products to public beta by the end of 2026. Probably both. I will write a separate note when we are ready.
Third, we are going to keep saying no. To the wrong clients. To the wrong hires. To the wrong shortcuts. This is the part that is hardest to hold the line on as you grow. It is also the part that matters most.
If you have read this far, here is the only thing I want you to take away. Skimbox exists because I genuinely believe the gap between a good idea and a shipped product is where most companies fail, and I want us to be the people who close that gap for the founders and operators who deserve it. That is the whole thesis. Everything else is execution.
Thanks for reading. If you want to talk, my email is at the bottom of this site.
Aman
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