Inside LEAP: How Saudi Arabia is building a global meeting point for technology

LEAP has come a long way in the last few years. In its early editions, many global technology companies viewed the tech event as a new opportunity in Saudi Arabia. Today, those companies have or are establishing regional headquarters, investing in research, and expanding long-term operations in the kingdom, which aims to become a global innovation hub under Vision 2030.

That transformation is perhaps most visible. Returning for its fifth edition, LEAP 2026 is expected to bring together more than 201,000 attendees, 1,800 technology brands, 1,900 investors, 1,000 speakers, and 600 startups. Alongside DeepFest, it has evolved beyond a technology conference into a platform for announcing investments, forging partnerships, and launching new ventures.

A GLOBAL HUB

Mike Champion, CEO of Tahaluf, has worked in the region’s events industry for about 15 years. In that time, he says, he has never seen a market grow as quickly as Saudi Arabia’s, as many international companies are establishing leadership teams, regional headquarters, and operations in Riyadh, using the kingdom as a base for their broader regional expansion. “The difference is precisely that between a visiting delegation and a resident business.”

“Global chief executives now arrive with investment plans, partnership mandates and deployment roadmaps, because they can see a market where policy, capital and infrastructure are pulling in the same direction under Vision 2030,” adds Champion.

“LEAP has been part of that transition, and it will keep giving the world somewhere to witness it.”

At the same time, LEAP is also positioning itself as a bridge between Saudi Arabia and the global technology ecosystem.

“LEAP is rooted in Saudi Arabia’s national priorities and global in its outlook, and that combination is precisely what makes the bridge work. A bridge carries traffic in both directions,” he says, adding that since Tahaluf was founded, well over 145,000 unique business tourists have traveled to the kingdom to attend its events. Many arrive with little prior understanding of Saudi Arabia and leave as advocates for the country.

“Traffic now runs the other way as well,” Champion says, pointing to LEAP East in Hong Kong as the first international expansion of a Saudi-built exhibition brand. The event will launch at approximately five to seven times the size of a typical debut exhibition.

“That tells you the model developed in Riyadh travels. When a shared project in the kingdom anchors a policymaker from one continent and a founder from another, the bridge stops being a metaphor.”

MEASURING WHAT HAPPENS AFTER 

Champion says a market forms “wherever buyers and sellers can reliably find one another.”

And bringing investors, policymakers, and technology leaders into the same venue with a shared agenda has helped. “Which is why new funds, strategic agreements, and regional headquarters are announced in Riyadh during LEAP.”

Tahaluf’s events generated $17.6 billion in economic impact between 2023 and 2025. Set that against the marquee sporting brands, and the comparison becomes instructive, he says. “The World Cup in Qatar was $17 billion and the Paris Olympics $11 billion, but each of those is a single moment before the circus moves on.”

Champion says it’s important to focus on longer-term indicators of success, such as repeat participation, a strong pipeline for the next edition, and the quarter-million jobs the portfolio has helped create. “Those are the measures that compound.”

Champion points to previous success stories as evidence of LEAP’s impact. “EduFi is the clearest illustration,” he says, noting that Aleena Nadeem won the LEAP Award in 2025 and that the education finance company later secured investment from Alumni Ventures, whose representative had first encountered the business while judging the competition.

“One introduction, made in the ordinary course of the event, changed the trajectory of the company.” Bringing together investors, corporate buyers and market-entry partners, enabling promising ideas to move from first conversations to commercial opportunities in hours rather than months is its true value, he says.

FOSTERING CONNECTION

LEAP’s first task was to assemble a credible international audience, and now the focus is on giving those participants reasons to build something together.

“The early editions were about assembling the guest list. The work now is about what gets built once everyone is in the room,” he says, explaining that LEAP’s initial objective was to establish Saudi Arabia as a global meeting place for the technology industry and demonstrate the scale of the opportunity. With that foundation in place, he says the focus has shifted to building lasting partnerships and new ventures.

“None of it would have happened through the private sector working alone. Our partnership with the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) and the Saudi Federation for Cybersecurity, Programming and Drones (SAFCSP)is why a founder can meet a regulator, an investor, and a government buyer in the same week. That combination is genuinely rare anywhere in the world.”

This collaboration has made co-creation a reality, leading to joint ventures, R&D partnerships, and pilot projects that have progressed from the LEAP stage to deployment.

The tech event is designed around participants’ objectives to create meaningful outcomes rather than simply facilitate networking. 

“A founder needs routes to customers and capital. An investor needs relevant companies at the right stage. A government partner needs to see national priorities reflected in what happens on the floor,” says Annabelle Mander, Executive Vice President at Tahaluf.

The team’s role is to remove barriers that prevent those connections from happening, she says. “If someone is spending their energy finding a room or a meeting, they aren’t spending it building a relationship, and that is a design failure on our part rather than theirs. Get the intent right and take the obstacles away, and collaboration tends to happen on its own.”

BUILDING BEYOND THE EVENT 

LEAP aims to grow beyond a successful annual event.

“We are building three things in parallel: a professionalized Saudi events workforce, permanent exhibition capacity, and year-round programming that keeps relationships alive between editions,” Champion says.

Developing local talent is the most important element of that strategy, he says, as it creates lasting employment opportunities, strengthens skills within the kingdom and ensures the industry’s benefits continue long after each event concludes.

He adds that the events industry creates a compounding effect similar to that of capital markets. “Events generate deals, deals create businesses, and those businesses make the following edition more valuable to attend. What we are constructing is a permanent industry rather than a calendar of annual spikes.”

At the same time, Mander says, keeping local innovators at the center of LEAP’s global growth is a deliberate decision, rather than something it hopes to happen. “Local founders and scaleups get stage time, curated introductions, and visibility in the parts of the program that international visitors attend. If that were left to chance, the biggest brands could crowd them out.”

She says the event’s global audience creates valuable opportunities by bringing investors, expertise and buyers directly to Saudi founders, and her  “job is to design the connection between the two so that the growth in global attendance strengthens the ecosystem in the kingdom.”

Eventually, LEAP’s success will be measured by the outcomes it creates. 

Implementation, rather than announcements, is the true measure of impact, she says. “Announcements generate attention. Implementation creates value. A founder closing a round, a company entering a new market or a partner returning with a bigger commitment tells us far more than an attendance figure ever will. When the conversations turn into activity you can measure, we have done our job.”

FUTURE OUTLOOK AND AMBITIONS

Looking ahead, Mander says LEAP and DeepFest aim to reshape how international visitors perceive Saudi Arabia’s innovation ecosystem. 

“I want people to leave understanding that Saudi Arabia has become a place where technology is created. Many arrive expecting a market that adopts what others build, and what they find is capability being developed here: AI research, homegrown startups and intellectual property owned in the kingdom.”

As Saudi Arabia marks its Year of Artificial Intelligence, Mander says the conversation around AI has shifted from experimentation to implementation.

“The conversation has moved from what AI can do to what it is already doing. The people coming to DeepFest this year are the ones putting it to work inside their organizations, and they arrive with results to share rather than theories to test.”

She expects discussions to focus on data, infrastructure and large-scale AI deployment.

Champion says Saudi Arabia’s defining contribution will be demonstrating how national ambition, long-term capital and digital infrastructure “can be marshaled behind a single technology vision, at a pace almost no other economy can match.”