Through its participation in LEAP 2026 in Riyadh, Salla revealed a broader vision for the future of commerce, highlighted by its acquisition of PayLink, investment in NmlApp, launch of the Sabbaq smart commerce accelerator, partnership with Aramex for fulfillment services, collaboration with Qitaf by stc, and a memorandum of understanding with the Social Development Bank.
Bringing together more than 1,800 global technology brands, 1,000 speakers and 1,900 investors, LEAP gave Salla a platform to demonstrate how it is moving beyond simply enabling businesses to establish online stores toward building a more integrated ecosystem spanning payments, logistics, artificial intelligence, retail distribution, customer loyalty and access to digital commerce.
The company’s vision was also represented by Nawaf Hariri, Co-founder and CEO of Salla, who appeared on the CODE stage to discuss the transformation of e-commerce over more than a decade and the opportunities ahead for the next ten years, while Arwa Abdulkarim, Salla’s Product Marketing Manager, documented the company’s participation throughout the event. Hariri highlighted the role of technology in creating faster, more trusted, and personalized commerce experiences, with that vision extending beyond the stage into Salla’s announcements across payments, logistics, and AI.
One of the clearest examples of this expansion came through Salla’s acquisition of PayLink, which strengthens its financial services ecosystem and expands its ability to offer more integrated payment solutions across both digital and physical sales channels. The move reflects how the needs of merchants change as their businesses grow: a company that begins with an online store may eventually need to manage payments across multiple sales channels, markets, currencies, and payment methods, making financial infrastructure an increasingly important part of the commerce journey. By bringing PayLink into its ecosystem, Salla is extending its role from helping merchants establish their stores to supporting how they manage payments as those businesses become more complex.
That same ambition is visible in Sabbaq, Salla’s newly announced smart commerce accelerator for founders building AI products. The eight-week program is designed to allow AI entrepreneurs to work on real commercial challenges, test their solutions with real users, and potentially access Salla’s ecosystem of more than 68,000 merchants and 17 million customers, alongside potential paths for integration, partnership and investment depending on the product and its stage. As artificial intelligence increasingly enters product discovery, marketing, customer service, store management and purchasing, Salla is positioning its ecosystem not only to adopt AI but also to help develop the next generation of AI-powered commerce solutions.
Yet Salla’s vision at LEAP 2026 extended beyond the digital storefront and into the infrastructure required to support growing businesses. Through its agreement with Aramex, Salla is providing merchants with fulfillment services covering product receiving and storage, inventory management, order preparation, and shipping. The partnership addresses one of the challenges that emerges when an online business begins to scale: more orders create greater operational demands, requiring merchants to manage larger inventories, prepare more shipments, and coordinate delivery across increasingly wider markets. By extending fulfillment capabilities through Aramex, Salla aims to help merchants focus on growing their businesses while the operational infrastructure behind their orders becomes easier to manage.
Salla is also expanding the places where merchants can sell, with its investment in NmlApp, a platform focused on connecting brands and e-commerce stores with traditional retail markets and physical points of sale. The investment is intended to help Salla merchants expand product distribution through NmlApp’s network without having to build new physical retail and distribution infrastructure from scratch. This represents another step in Salla’s evolution from an e-commerce platform toward a broader commerce ecosystem in which a merchant’s growth is not limited to a single digital sales channel.
The company is approaching customer engagement from the same ecosystem perspective through its partnership with Qitaf, stc’s loyalty program, which allows customers to earn and redeem Qitaf points at participating stores on Salla. For merchants, the partnership introduces an established loyalty mechanism into the purchasing experience, potentially strengthening customer engagement and creating another incentive for shoppers to return to participating businesses.
At the other end of the merchant journey, Salla signed a memorandum of understanding with the Social Development Bank to support productive families and freelancers seeking to establish and develop their e-commerce businesses. The collaboration aims to help beneficiaries create and grow online stores, expand their reach, and access new markets through digital channels, allowing more entrepreneurs to participate in the expanding digital economy.
While the announcements represented different parts of the commerce ecosystem, Salla’s presence at LEAP ultimately returned to the same point: the merchant. Throughout the event, Salla’s pavilion became a meeting point for merchants, entrepreneurs and business owners, allowing the company’s teams and leadership to engage directly with businesses, understand their experiences and discuss the challenges involved in starting, operating and scaling a commerce business. Those conversations brought the technology discussed across LEAP back to its practical purpose: solving the problems that merchants face as their businesses evolve.
Taken together, Salla’s LEAP 2026 announcements tell a story that is larger than an acquisition, an investment, or a series of partnerships. PayLink strengthens payments, Aramex supports fulfillment, NmlApp opens additional distribution opportunities, Qitaf adds a loyalty layer, Sabbaq brings AI founders into the ecosystem, and the Social Development Bank partnership helps new groups enter digital commerce. Each initiative addresses a different stage or challenge in the merchant journey, but together they point toward the same direction: building a commerce ecosystem that can grow alongside the businesses it serves.
More than a decade ago, the challenge was making it easier for businesses to enter e-commerce and establish an online presence. Today, as the market matures and merchants become more ambitious, the challenge is no longer simply getting businesses online; it is giving them the payments, logistics, technology, distribution, customer engagement, and financial support required to keep growing once they are there. That is the bigger message behind Salla’s LEAP 2026 presence: the company is not only building tools for e-commerce, but increasingly shaping an ecosystem designed to make commerce itself easier, more connected, and more scalable at every stage of a merchant’s growth.
Source: https://salla.com/blog/salla-leap-2026
