Haider Khan, Dubizzle Group MENA: Building Is Easy, Selling Is the Test

From engineering to sales

Haider Ali Khan is chief executive of Bayut and dubizzle, and of Dubizzle Group MENA. The platforms span property, cars, classifieds and jobs. Dubizzle lists more than 20,000 cars a month and draws over 300,000 job seekers a day; Bayut connects millions of property seekers and real estate professionals across the UAE. The group has raised more than US$450 million in investment.

At the Tech Innovation Forum 2026, held on September 17 at Habtoor Palace, Khan recalled an early office smaller than the stage he spoke from, staffed by a handful of people. In 2021 the company turned its name into a verb. "Dubizzle it" came to mean listing, selling or finding something on the platform.

He spent 15 years in technology in the United States before moving to the UAE in 2014. Born in Pakistan, he was drawn by proximity to home and by Bayut, a small company his brothers had founded. The conventional wisdom, he was told, was that incumbents in general classifieds and marketplaces are not challenged. He said he had spent his life chasing challenges, and found this one interesting.

Product work was familiar. Sales were not. Khan described an engineering mindset as digging into a problem at the leaf level, and said running sales, then marketing, then a brand were new territory. You can build something really awesome, he said, but "if you can't sell it, there's a problem".

A merger, and a fast market

In 2020, six years after he joined, Bayut and dubizzle came under one group when their parent companies, Emerging Markets Property Group and OLX Group, merged their MENA and South Asia operations. The Dubai-based company was valued at AED3.6 billion, or US$1 billion, giving it unicorn status.

Khan said the technology on offer could be better, but carving out space in a crowded market was a separate discipline. He credited Dubai, citing almost tenfold growth since 2019 or earlier, and supportive government, legislation and infrastructure. The catchphrase, he suggested, grew out of Dubai itself.

Search data makes the platforms a leading indicator, he said. Demand starts on Bayut and dubizzle, so the group spots shifts early, such as more interest in villas than apartments, and can read across dubizzle's other categories to see which cars are moving or where supply is thin.

Data, AI and slow habits

AI investment began five or six years ago, Khan said, and not in building large language models. The group keeps a large, disproportionate data team to ensure its data is clean, understood and protected. Data is what stops a business being easily replaced, he argued, if it is walled off and used to build proprietary models.

He still treats AI as a productivity tool internally, but sees little dramatic change in consumer behaviour. Habits shift slowly, he said, and people object even when a social platform changes its interface. Adoption of new tools is growing from a small base, which leaves platforms balancing how much to ship: release too much and the effort goes to waste.

Backing builders

The group keeps acquiring and investing. It bought Property Monitor, a UAE real-estate market intelligence platform, in April of last year, and over the summer put money into Tern, a rental rewards platform that lets tenants pay rent by credit card, and Takeem, which helps landlords secure insurance. Khan said it looks for founders who build and execute, then backs them with capital and access to its consumer base.

His advice to founders: take risks early, while responsibilities are light, and be builders, a quality he said he hires for. It is never too late, he added. He started late himself.