What Two Years of Building in the UAE Has Taught Me About Female Founders

When I moved to Dubai in 2023 to build Endless, the conversation about female founders in the UAE was something I'd only seen from a distance. London, where I'd been working, talked about women in business as a fixed conversation. The challenges were known. The numbers were known. The vocabulary was settled.

The UAE conversation, I quickly realised, was something else. It wasn't settled at all. It was being written, by women on the ground, every day. And being part of that has changed how I think about what female founders actually need.

Here's what two years here has taught me.

The opportunity is more open than the story suggests

The narrative about women in business in MENA, particularly from outside the region, tends to lead with constraint. I understand why. There are real structural issues across the wider region that deserve serious attention.

But the version on the ground in the UAE is genuinely different, and I think it's worth saying clearly.

I have been welcomed here. As a founder, as a woman, as someone arriving with an outside accent and an unfamiliar business model, I have been welcomed. By customers. By investors. By government bodies. By other founders, almost all of whom have answered my messages, taken the call, made the introduction.

That openness is the UAE's competitive advantage. It is not subtle and it is not accidental. The country has decided that women building businesses here is something to support, and the on-the-ground experience of that policy is more practical than I had expected.

Female founders here are building for women on purpose

The thing that has surprised me most is how many of the women I've met building businesses in the UAE are deliberately building for other women.

Not by accident. Not as a side effect of being female founders. As a strategy.

Endless is one of those businesses. We are female-founded, our leadership is largely female, and our customer is a woman. The whole loop is built with women in mind, by women who understand the user because we are the user.

What I've noticed is how powerful that becomes when you're surrounded by other founders doing the same thing. The conversations move faster. The empathy is built in. When I sit down with another female founder building in beauty, wellness, fashion, fitness, or financial products for women in this region, we are talking about the same customer, just from different angles.

That cluster effect matters. It is part of why the UAE is producing more interesting female-founded businesses than people outside the region realise.

The harder lessons

I won't pretend everything has been smooth. Building anywhere is hard, and building in a market this fast-moving comes with its own version of difficulty.

Three lessons have stuck with me from the last two years.

The first is that you have to be your own advocate, particularly early. The UAE is supportive but it is busy. There are a lot of founders here. If you wait to be discovered you will be waiting a long time. The women I've watched grow fastest are the ones who got comfortable with self-promotion in a way they hadn't been at home.

The second is that local relationships compound far faster than transactional ones. The investors, partners, and team members who have shaped Endless most are the ones I built real relationships with, slowly, over coffees and dinners and showing up to each other's launches. That part doesn't shortcut.

The third is that resilience matters more than confidence. Confidence wavers. Mine has. What gets you through is the underlying decision that you are going to keep showing up regardless of how a particular week has gone. That muscle has to be built. It isn't innate.

What I want for the next generation of women coming here

Two years in, I'm clearer than I've ever been that the UAE is one of the most exciting places in the world right now for a female founder to build.

The infrastructure is here. The customers are here. The capital is increasingly here. The community of other founders is real and growing.

What I want for the women considering the move is what I would have wanted to hear myself. You don't need a perfect plan to get on the plane. You need a real reason to come, and the willingness to do the unglamorous work once you arrive.

The opportunity is not theoretical. I've seen it convert into businesses. Endless is one of them. There are many others, and many more being built right now.

If you're thinking about it, come and see for yourself.

The UAE has rewarded me for taking the leap. It will reward more women for taking the same one.

You can see what we're building at Endless.