Key Takeaways
- RAY Labs is a property and tenant management platform serving over 25,000 users across 5 countries, with clients reporting a 30% increase in tenant engagement, a 25% improvement in retention rates, and a 20% cut in operational costs.
- The company does not replace existing CRM or ERP systems. It connects to them, giving property managers a unified digital experience for tenants without requiring them to abandon what they already use.
- Bootstrapped since 2017 and profitable, RAY Labs doubled its recurring revenue over the past two years and is now moving into North Africa after establishing a strong foothold in Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Overview
RAY Labs is a proptech company founded in 2017 and headquartered in Riyadh, with additional operations in Beirut and the UAE. The company builds RAY, an all-in-one tenant and property management platform used by residential and commercial real estate operators across Saudi Arabia and the UAE. It was co-founded by Ayman, who serves as CEO, and Joseph Saliba, who serves as CTO.
Background
RAY Labs began inside BDD, the Beirut Digital District, with an idea focused on community management for the companies operating there. A conversation with Mohamad Rabbah, who runs BDD, pointed the founders toward a broader opportunity: building a community management tool that could serve both residential and commercial properties, starting in Lebanon.
The timing mattered. Around the world, companies were rapidly digitizing their internal operations through tools like Microsoft Teams and Slack. Real estate, by contrast, had barely moved. Property managers were still relying on phone calls, spreadsheets, and disconnected systems to manage tenant relationships, maintenance requests, and billing. While every other industry was adopting collaborative digital tools, real estate companies in the region were operating the same way they had for decades.
Ayman’s background as an electrical engineer with experience in energy management and real estate gave him enough exposure to the sector to recognize the gap, and enough outside perspective to see it as solvable. The product that emerged from that recognition became RAY’s B2B SaaS platform.
Mission and Approach
RAY Labs operates on a simple principle: build the product around what operations on the ground actually need, not what looks good in a roadmap. Ayman describes the team’s adaptability as central to how they work, with a standing internal challenge that captures the mindset: the moment you think you know the market, it’s when you probably do not.
The platform is split into two main verticals. RAY Residential serves gated compounds, residential developments, holiday homes, and condominiums. RAY Commercial serves business clusters, business centers, co-working spaces, and retail complexes. Both are built around the same underlying philosophy: give tenants, property managers, and facility teams a single digital space to communicate, report issues, book amenities, manage deliveries, and handle payments.
Crucially, RAY does not position itself as a replacement for CRM or ERP systems. It positions itself as the layer that sits on top of and connects to those systems, giving end users a modern digital experience without forcing companies to rip out the infrastructure they have already invested in.
Product and Offering
RAY Residential covers facility management, issue reporting, space booking, visitor management, delivery management, community feeds, polls and surveys, and tenant communication, all within a single app experience designed for residents.
RAY Commercial mirrors that functionality for business environments, adding access control and tenant communication tools designed for the operational complexity of business clusters, business centers, co-working spaces, and retail complexes.
Across both products, RAY includes revenue and billing tools covering invoicing, payments, subscriptions, and lease management, along with reporting and analytics that give property managers visibility into performance and tenant satisfaction. Integration as a service connects RAY to the external systems clients already use, and white labeling allows property management companies to offer RAY under their own brand.
The platform is continuously upgraded, with the company treating ongoing development as a core part of the product rather than a periodic overhaul.
Business Model
RAY Labs operates on a B2B subscription model. Clients, typically property managers and facility managers, purchase packages based on the number of end users they need to support. Revenue is recurring, tied to the ongoing relationship between RAY and the property management companies that deploy the platform across their portfolios.
Market and Reach
RAY Labs operates across the GCC and MENA, with Saudi Arabia and the UAE as its core markets. The platform supports over 25,000 users across 5 countries, with notable clients including Zamil Real Estate, BDD, Al-Bustan Village, Vives Compound, and the Sharjah Research Technology and Innovation Park. Saudi Arabia has become the company’s primary growth focus, given the scale of the market’s real estate development and its broader digitization push under Vision 2030. North Africa is the next region the company is looking to enter.
Funding and Support
RAY Labs is bootstrapped. The company has not raised external funding and has grown its recurring revenue base organically since founding.
Traction and Growth
RAY Labs describes itself as being in growth mode. Given the operating environment the company has navigated since 2017, including Lebanon’s economic collapse and regional instability, Ayman points to simple survival as a meaningful indicator in itself. Beyond that, recurring revenue has doubled over the past two years, and the company has successfully established a strong presence in the Saudi market, which it sees as the clearest validation of product strength.
Clients adopting RAY report a 30% increase in tenant engagement, a 25% improvement in retention rates, and a 20% reduction in operational costs, figures that translate directly into the kind of measurable outcomes property management companies use to justify continued investment in the platform.
Hitting pre-set growth targets every year, even when expansion took longer than expected, is the milestone Ayman points to as most significant. He attributes that consistency to staying close to clients and treating their feedback as a two-way digitization process rather than a one-directional product rollout.
Misconception
RAY Labs is often mistaken for a CRM or ERP system. It is neither, and the company is direct about that. RAY is not built to replace the systems property management companies already rely on for core operations. It is built to extend and amplify them, giving tenants and property managers a modern digital experience layered on top of existing infrastructure.
Outlook
The next 6 to 12 months are focused on growth. Recruiting the right talent has been one of the company’s hardest challenges, not because talent does not exist in the region but because finding the right fit for a product-driven company with little room for error has taken time. With a team that Ayman describes as fully aligned behind the company’s mission, the focus now is on scaling what has already worked in Saudi Arabia and the UAE into new markets, starting with North Africa.
