Omar Benslimane

Omar Benslimane co-founded Kestrel Systems in 2015 after seven years as an integration engineer inside a regional logistics group, an experience he describes as a long education in how much of the operating cost of a large company is simply the friction between systems that were never designed to speak.

Kestrel builds industrial data infrastructure: the connective layer that lets warehouse management, customs documentation, fleet telematics and finance systems exchange information without a human retyping it. The company now serves clients across the Gulf, with concentrations in ports, third-party logistics and light manufacturing. It is profitable, has raised comparatively little outside capital, and Benslimane has been openly sceptical of growth-at-any-cost financing in the region.

He is a working engineer who still reviews architecture decisions. The Kestrel technical culture is documented in an internal engineering handbook, portions of which he has published, and which is notable mainly for its insistence on boring technology choices and thorough migration planning. He has argued that the enterprise technology market in the region is poorly served by vendors optimised for demo quality rather than the ten-year maintenance horizon that industrial clients actually operate on.

Benslimane co-chairs a regional working group on interoperability standards for freight documentation, and has spoken about the economic cost of paper-based customs processes with a precision that suggests he has measured it. He hires deliberately slowly, runs a distributed engineering team across three time zones, and has written that the hardest part of scaling a technical organisation is preserving the ability to say clearly that something will take longer than the client wants.

He holds a degree in computer engineering and lives in Dubai with his family.