Unique Omani Tech Start-Ups: Innovation Across Hospitality, Legal, and Mental Wellbeing

As a sequel to our initial feature on some of the most unique tech startups from Oman, here we highlight another three from the colourful local ecosystem. Each of them exciting, these ventures tackle a unique set of problems with local flavour while transforming traditional industries in interesting ways.

Revolutionizing hospitality, legal services, and mental healthcare in the country, these three startups embody Oman’s unique ethos of robust tech solutions, niche problems, and tradition-inspired service, placing them in strong contrast to the offering elsewhere in the GCC.

In today’s edition of our ‘Unique Omani Tech Startups’ series, we explore the journeys of three exceptional startups from Oman: Fanadaq.com, Remedy, and Decree.

Designed to connect people and businesses with their love for hospitality, Fanadaq.com is the first-ever hotel booking website from Oman.
The tech startup from Muscat first made its mark as a platform to simplify online hotel bookings, and gained popularity with its simple, user-friendly website plus its large hotel inventory on the back of strong partnerships with local and international hotel brands dotting Oman’s many cities.

Fanadaq has since gone on to introduce a venue booking service for individuals and business to host their private functions and corporate events respectively. The service has been received extremely well, accommodating 10,000 guests across events ranging from weddings, and graduation ceremonies, to corporate meetings, within the first month of its launch.

The startup has made iterative improvements and expanded its offering gradually, continuously identifying customer/market needs and delivering them seamlessly through the Fanadaq.com platform. And their latest feature, a buffet booking service, also a first in Oman, has increased its users exponentially, with the country’s food aficionados now using the platform to book their favourite gastronomic experiences in a simple way.

While fine-tuning its experience, Fanadaq is well-set to capture the Omani market and move across borders to neighbouring GCC nations progressively.

A first in the country and possibly all MENA, Decree is an online database offering a vast, comprehensive collection of English-translated Omani laws. It offers access to legal knowledge and documents ranging from royal decrees, laws, ministerial decisions, and regulations, to treaties published in the Official Gazette.

For English language consolidated versions of Omani laws, with amendments, revisions, and changes made to the original laws over time, Decree relies on the consolidated laws published on Qanoon.om, which is a prior digital legal initiative by the same team.

To highlight its comprehensiveness, Decree carries every royal decree and ministerial decision published in the Official Gazette since 1973 and boasts over 700 fully translated legal instruments.

As the startup’s tech offering has become more powerful, with full-text search functionality and sorting options, it has allowed users to find the legal instrument they need quickly and absorb the intricacies of Omani legislation in a simple way.

To share a few examples of Decree’s utility across legal and business spaces, it covers everything from Royal Decrees on agreements between the Sultanate of Oman and other nations on bilateral cooperation, and Ministerial Decisions on the return for obtaining a commercial debt or loan, to opinion blogs on the need in Oman for a ranked-choice voting system in the Shura Elections.

‘Decree Intel’, one of the legal startup’s latest features, offers a vast collection of Omani legal research material from the Decree team itself, providing value to everyone from academics, researchers, and legal professionals to businesses.

With Decree in demand among local legal practitioners, global law firms, as well as international businesses looking to navigate the Omani legal landscape, it is on a growth trajectory on the back of the transparency it offers and the rich decision-making it promotes.

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Another first in the country, Remedy is on a mission to simplify mental healthcare in Oman while removing the unnecessary stigma that surrounds it.

A pioneering online platform connecting people to clinics and professional therapists, the startup also has developed a corporate solution for employees to nurture a more balanced, empathetic work environment.

Remedy operates on the premise that each person’s mental health journey is unique, deserving custom attention and understanding, which it provides by combining compassionate care with advanced tech including AI.

The stigma surrounding mental health is dealt with by giving individuals a simple platform to seamlessly book appointments with some of the top mental health clinics and professionals in Oman, while also giving the option of connecting via video call for sessions.

Considering the high-stress environments we live in today, both in a personal and business sense, Remedy’s simple but powerful offering is set to transform mental healthcare through their digital platform, so Omanis can enjoy better overall wellbeing.