The problem
Gulf employers hunt for developers while thousands of ambitious young Arabs stare at English-only tutorials with no mentor, no structure, and no path to a job. The region had talent demand and learning appetite but no dedicated school connecting the two.
How it works
Launched in 2015 by Ahmad Marafi and Hashim Behbehani, Coded is the region’s first dedicated coding academy. It runs intensive offline bootcamps in software development and programming, and operates Barmej, an online platform with Arabic coding courses — free lessons plus extensive paid online bootcamps. Graduates leave prepared for junior developer roles or founding their own startups.
Pain points
No local coding schools, curricula locked behind English, and self-study with no feedback loop, no cohort, and no employer waiting at the end.
Business model
Tuition for in-person bootcamps, paid online bootcamps at about $350 a month, and enterprise upskilling contracts — including a month-long Data Champion bootcamp built with Burgan Bank to train its staff in data analytics.
Challenges
Instructor quality is hard to scale across cities; free global platforms compete on price; and the academy’s reputation ultimately rests on verifiable graduate hiring, which must hold up cohort after cohort.
Funding
- Raised: $1.3M Pre-Series A to expand online and offline offerings (Entrepreneur Middle East).
- Valuation: MISSING.
Latest — August 2025
On 7 August 2025 Burgan Bank launched its Data Champion bootcamp, developed in strategic partnership with Coded and billed as the first program of its kind in Kuwait — a month-long internal bootcamp to build data fluency across the bank’s departments, with Coded co-founder and COO Hashim Behbehani hosting the program.