# How the sample was drawn

1. Source: one public funding feed, Wamda's news listing (wamda.com/news), read in published order from newest to oldest: 473 articles dated 23 September 2026 back to 30 September 2025. No other list was used, so every company comes from the same ordered source.
2. A headline qualified if it reported a named company raising equity or debt: an announced round, strategic investment or credit facility. Funds, accelerators, acquisitions, exits, secondary sales, partnerships, licences, launches and duplicate mentions of the same company were excluded.
3. Country is the country Wamda tagged the article with, and it had to be Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman or Morocco. Sector comes from Wamda's description and had to be one of these: fintech (including insurtech), e-commerce, delivery, proptech, health, edtech, mobility, SaaS (B2B software, including AI software sold to businesses) or HR. Licensed banks, financial groups, government entities and companies known to have shut down were excluded. Fintech startups building digital banks (Mal, Fasset) stayed in.
4. 184 companies passed those filters. Each was checked in order, good sites and bad alike, until 100 had a public web Arabic version. The 100th was DOO, in Wamda's article of 30 September 2025. Nothing was selected for having faults.
5. Arabic version means a visitor can reach Arabic page copy from the company's own website: a language switcher, an hreflang ar link, an Arabic default homepage, or a redirect based on the browser's language. Arabic that exists only in the mobile app, an Arabic URL that nothing links to, or a switcher that leaves the page in English did not count.
6. arabic_url is the page a visitor lands on after choosing Arabic, checked on 25 September 2026. 95 returned HTTP 200 to curl. The other 5 (Nayla, Yakeey, noon, Rology, STAMP) block curl, and each loaded in Arabic in a normal Chrome browser on the same day. On 6 sites (Dawraty, ARRW, Byit, SahmAlgo, Workey, Arsann) the switcher changes the language without changing the URL, so arabic_url is the same address as the homepage.
7. Skipped: 79 of the 184 had a working website with no Arabic version (43%). Another 4 had no website we could find. One (barq) was left out because its site blocked us from our location, so it could not be checked. Of the 69 UAE companies, 53 had no Arabic version.
8. Every article read, the decision on it and the reason is in candidates.csv, with a homepage, status and note for each of the 184 companies.