EBLA Ventures Backs Syrian Home-Repair Platform Salehli With $100,000

For anyone who has tried to find a plumber in Damascus, the problem is rarely the plumbing. It is the guessing game that follows: who to call, what the job should cost, whether the man who shows up will finish what he started. Salehli, a Syrian startup barely a year old, is betting that a digital marketplace can replace that guesswork — and EBLA Ventures has just put $100,000 behind the wager.

The investment, EBLA's fourth deal of 2026, values nothing on paper yet and discloses no stage or co-investors. What is public is the traction: more than 15,000 users and 3,500 service professionals in under a year, over 10,000 service requests processed, and repeat customers making up nearly half the base. Founded in 2025 by AbdulRhman Arnaout, Salehli lets customers submit a request, collect quotations from pre-vetted maintenance and renovation professionals, and rely on an on-site team to supervise quality. The new capital is earmarked for electronic payments, a push into B2B maintenance for companies and institutions, and expansion into additional Syrian cities.

EBLA Ventures is not a household name outside the region, but it has become one of the more active early-stage investors in Syria's nascent startup scene. The firm's interest in Salehli grew out of the Thimar programme, which works with Syrian founders on business development and performance monitoring before any cheque is written. That pipeline matters in a market where conventional venture due diligence is nearly impossible: no reliable credit data, thin corporate registries, and a customer base that has learned to distrust formal contracts. EBLA effectively incubated the company before funding it, a model that is becoming standard for investors willing to touch Syrian assets.

The sector Salehli is attacking is enormous and almost entirely informal. Across the Middle East, home maintenance and renovation is a cash business built on personal recommendations, with pricing that varies by neighbourhood and mood. In Syria, years of conflict and displacement have made the informal network even more dominant — and more fragile. A platform that verifies professionals, standardises quotations and sends a supervisor to the site is not just a convenience play. It is an attempt to build trust infrastructure where the state and the banks have largely retreated.

That is why the electronic payments component deserves attention. Syria remains overwhelmingly cash-based, and digital payment rails are patchy at best. If Salehli can persuade customers and tradesmen to transact through the platform, it creates a record of economic activity that barely exists today — a ledger of small transactions that could eventually support credit scoring, insurance and formal employment for thousands of technicians. The B2B pivot points the same way: companies and institutions need maintenance contracts they can audit, and they are more likely to pay electronically than a household in Aleppo.

For international readers who track Middle East capital, this is a small cheque with an outsized signal. Gulf funds and regional family offices have spent the past two years circling Syria's reconstruction story, mostly from a distance, waiting for stability and bankable projects. EBLA is doing the unglamorous work of seeding consumer platforms at the ground level, where the needs are immediate and the competition is thin. A hundred thousand dollars will not transform Syria's service economy. But the fourth deal in a single year suggests EBLA is building a portfolio, not placing a one-off bet — and that its partners expect the Syrian consumer market to be worth owning before the bigger money arrives.

The next test is whether Salehli can turn 15,000 users into a habit. Electronic payments, new cities and business customers are three different execution problems, and $100,000 does not stretch far across all of them. What it can buy is proof: that Syrians will pay for transparency, and that a startup can scale in a market the rest of the world still treats as uninvestable. If that proof holds, the next cheque will be larger — and it will not come only from EBLA.