Former PayPal exec joins Bayut as new CEO for its Saudi business

Leading property portal in the UAE, Bayut, in workings with its Saudi expansion after acquiring Lamudi, that Haroon Rashid, a former PayPal executive will be the new CEO for Bayut Saudi.

Haroon who joined Bayut earlier this month was serving previously based in San Francisco Bay Rea, serving PayPal as Head of Mid-Market and SMB Integrations for North America. He brings over 20 years of experience in entrepreneurship and technology leadership, according to a statement by the company.

“At PayPal, he led integration and sales engineering for the Mid-Market as well as Small and Medium Business market segments, and drove over $90M in net-new recurring revenue for PayPal’s merchant business. During his time at PayPal he was also involved in jointly managing development of PayPal’s first global payments platform. He also lead strategic engineering projects at Magento, now an Adobe company, and X.commerce, an eBay company,” said Bayut.

“His wealth of experience and leadership will be valuable in setting the right direction for Bayut’s presence in Saudi Arabia,” the company added.

Bayut that overtook Property Finder as most visited online property portal in UAE two months ago and still maintains the lead, being a new player in Saudi (in spite of acquiring Lamudi and redirecting its traffic to Bayut.sa) has a lot of catching up to do. Property Finder’s eSimSar is one of the leading property website in the Kingdom but a large number of users in Saudi still rely on regular classified websites (when they’re looking for a property to rent, buy or sell) like Haraj that receives close to 20 million visitors every month.

The company being a subsidiary of EMPG has the money (and now leadership as well) to make a name for itself in the Saudi market.

Haider Ali Khan, CEO of Bayut, commenting on appointment of the new CEO for Saudi, said, “We are excited to have Haroon onboard to lead our expansion and development in the Saudi Arabian market. Haroon brings many years of experience building high caliber teams, and growing businesses towards scale and efficiency."

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