It’s Tuesday, and I’m back. Today we’re focusing on Mnzil, a proptech company from Saudi Arabia. Founded by Majeed Albabtain and Abdulrahman Alshaya, the company recently completed an $11.7 million Series A funding round, led by Founders Fund and supported by COTU Ventures.

Among UN member states, Saudi Arabia ranks 11th by share of immigrants in its population, at 40.3%. If we exclude the UAE, then within the top eleven Saudi Arabia has a larger immigrant population than all the other countries combined. In absolute terms, 8.8 million workers are non-Saudi nationals, accounting for 79.2% of the labor force. Importantly for our discussion, every GCC member states is featured in the top eleven.

That immigrant population consists mostly of low- and medium-skilled workers. Roughly 70% of employed immigrants are in non-managerial, professional, or technical occupations, compared to 42% among locals. Elementary occupations account for 17.6% of the non-Saudi labor force, versus just 1.5% of the Saudi labor force.

The reliance on migrant workers is an established fact. The issues those workers face are also well documented. Human Rights Watch has reported workplace accidents resulting in deaths due to negligence, forced labor complaints, and an extremely challenging working environment due to severe heat. Workers also report 16-hour workdays on megaprojects such as NEOM.

On top of all of this, living environments are often harsh. On the one hand, migrant workers without higher education earn well below $700 per month on average, which makes it impossible to secure decent housing independently. On the other hand, it is the employer’s responsibility to provide housing, and the employer is typically:

Despite the government issuing detailed guidelines on how worker accommodations should be built and managed, 85% of migrant workers live in unorganized accommodations. These can include overcrowded rooms, with sleeping area, kitchen, and bathroom combined into a single space. As the World Bank report notes:

The government plans to close a four-million-bed gap by converting two million unorganized accommodations into organized housing. But government-led programs rarely go exactly to plan and are often mired in inefficiencies, disruptions, and extended timelines.

The challenge is compounded by the rapid expansion of the construction and infrastructure sectors, particularly through large-scale developments such as NEOM and the stadiums planned for the 2034 World Cup. Because many of these projects are situated in remote locations, accommodating the workforce will require the construction of entirely new housing.

Finally, there is another factor worth acknowledging. While I do not have hard data to prove this, the Saudi government has a history of taking sweeping actions. It favors large, centralized solutions over incremental fixes. Given that it is already exploring public-private partnerships to address worker housing, it is not hard to imagine a scenario in which a couple of companies are tasked with building and operating housing at scale.

One of those could be Mnzil.

Mnzil positions itself as a one-stop shop for labor services. Its initial offering is built around worker housing. In many cases today, companies operate everything themselves: they find the building, manage it, and distribute workers across units. Because these companies lack both the expertise to create decent accommodations and, frankly, the incentive to improve them, workers often end up living in overcrowded spaces with bathrooms that work only sporadically. Mnzil solves it by taking care of licensing, maintenance, rent payments, and day-to-day operations.

That means the problem Mnzil solves isn’t simply about providing beds. Instead, it offers a holistic solution where the client does not need to do anything and does not bear much responsibility for happens on that property. This reduces operational expenses and makes housing-related expenses far more predictable.

Each housing unit offered by Mnzil includes:

Each facility is managed by an on-site supervisor whose job is, well, to supervise. They monitor cleanliness, maintenance issues, and safety concerns daily and report any problems.

Now let’s talk about how the process of finding housing works.

To find accommodation, clients go to Mnzil’s website, choose a location where they want their workers to live, and book it in a flow that is broadly similar to Airbnb. The main difference is that, unlike Airbnb, the minimum stay is six months.

Once the client selects a facility, they sign a contract, and it takes Mnzil seven to fourteen days to prepare for workers to move in. If the property is newly sourced, preparation timelines may vary. Most contracts run for one to two years, with the option to extend to a three-year commitment. When the property is ready, the workers can move in.

Housing is where Mnzil started, and from there it had several natural expansion paths, many of which the company is already pursuing. Alongside accommodation, the company now offers transportation and catering services. Both have a simple model: the client requests transport or organized meals, specifies the number of people to be served, and Mnzil manages the rest.

More recently, Mnzil has begun shifting beyond company-facing services toward products focused directly on employees. The first of these is early wage access (EWA), with plans to expand into remittances and health insurance. While we don’t know much about these offerings, it is reasonable to expect Mnzil to partner with specialized platforms rather than building these services entirely in-house.

Mnzil isn’t entrenched in a single operating model. Instead, it deploys assets in three distinct ways:

There’s also variety in the type of customers the company serves. It works with both large businesses, with the list of clients including Amazon and Nestle, as well as SMEs. The company is also actively hiring to participate in government tenders.

I’ll talk about how Mnzil makes money in a bit, but from a model-design perspective it’s important to note that Mnzil tries to convince its clients to pay on a semi-annual or annual basis. And here’s why that matters.

Its main expense is the facility itself, and here we don’t know how payments to the lender are structured. What we do know is that catering, supervision, and maintenance are paid either monthly or on a usage-based basis.

And so say the client pays $100,000 upfront for one year. This unlocks several things for the company:

Stay duration is another important factor lever, like the payment structure, adds a layer of predictability. First, it stabilizes occupancy, so if demand shifts suddenly, the company has time to adjust by increasing or reducing supply. Second, it allows setup costs to be amortized over a longer period and lowers them in practice, since these costs occur at most once every six months.

Mnzil charges on a per-worker basis, billing clients between $100 and $120 per person. Pricing varies depending on the service bundle, number of workers, location, and contract length. The company claims it reduces housing-related expenses by around 30% for clients overall, and by up to 60% for smaller businesses.

Today, Mnzil operates more than 60 facilities and manages housing for over 100 clients.

Two things give me pause.

The first is differentiation. I do have questions about how differentiated the business really is. There are companies offering similar services, at least on paper, and claiming to provide quality accommodation for workers. We don’t know how valid those claims are, but still. From the outside, it is not immediately obvious why Mnzil’s solution would be meaningfully harder to replicate than others.

The second concern is focus. The company is young and a bit all over the place. It operates under three models, serves three distinct customer segments, and is in the process of launching several new products.. For a young company, focus is everything. Some mistakes can be forgiven if the market is booming or if the company has enough capital to sustain multiple bets, but I’m generally not a fan of trying to do many things at once this early.

If Mnzil executes well on most of its product roadmap, it could build two-sided switching costs.

One side is taking care of company needs, such as housing and transporting employees. When everything’s going well, there’s no real reason for a client to switch. On top of that, by taking care of workers’ needs, such as insurance or early wage access, Mnzil can add a second layer of switching costs. You might ask why companies would care. At the end of the day, we haven’t seen many cases of companies going out of their way to take care of workers.

But say you’re a worker. Option A is joining a company whose facilities are managed by some random operator. Option B is going to work for a Mnzil client. You know that Mnzil not only offers better facilities, but also those additional benefits. A lot depends on how those benefits are actually distributed and how much say workers have in accessing them.

Still, Mnzil could get to a point where working with it helps companies attract better workers. That, in turn, attracts more clients to Mnzil, since it becomes a gateway to accessing better workers.

Then there’s international expansion. The case here is pretty clear. The same problems exist elsewhere in the region, and it’s reasonable to assume Mnzil could transfer its client relationships into neighboring countries.

A random thought I had is that the GCC may be one of the few regions where most countries face genuinely similar problems and operate under comparable conditions. The population shares a common language, the economies are single resource-dependent, the climate is effectively the same, and these countries are young. As a result, many products and business models are easily transferable within the region, yet those same products won’t fit in other regions.