Sarah Aboughaida remembers exactly where she was when she realized how close she’d come. A routine check of her paperwork revealed she was days away from missing a residency renewal, the kind of lapse that in the UAE can trigger overstay penalties climbing past AED 16,750 a year, plus exit fees, with no cap on how high it can go. She’d also just tallied up something else: months of forgotten and duplicate subscriptions quietly draining her account, charges she’d stopped noticing until she actually went looking.
That near-miss is the reason Kazna exists. Today, Sarah Aboughaida is the founder of one of the UAE’s most talked-about new apps, and a finalist, selected from more than 10,000 applicants, in Dubai Chambers’ Create Apps Championship.
A Problem She Lived, Not Just Researched
Founders are told constantly to “find a real pain point.” Sarah didn’t have to look far, she was living inside hers.
As an expat building a life in Dubai, she was juggling the same scattered mess of admin most households in the UAE quietly carry: visa and Emirates ID renewal dates buried in old emails, subscriptions signed up for once and forgotten, no single place to see what was due, what was paid, or what was about to become a problem. When she talked to other expat families, she heard the same story again and again: different names, same scramble.
“I chose this because I lived it,” is how she puts it. Not a market gap spotted from a spreadsheet, but a fine she almost paid, and a pattern she couldn’t unsee once she started looking for it.
From Advisory Rooms to Building Her Own Company
Before Kazna, Sarah spent years in management consulting, starting at Grant Thornton as an Advisory Associate, running valuations and market-entry strategy for clients across industries. She later founded and fundraised for an earlier venture of her own, taking it from idea to a funded company, and went on to advise a global lifestyle brand on growth strategy, valuation, and fundraising. Most recently, she led an innovation consulting engagement at Dubai Chambers, work that put her directly inside the UAE’s business and government ecosystem, before she left to build Kazna full-time.
That combination of strategy training, a previous fundraise already under her belt, and firsthand exposure to how government and business actually move in the UAE is what let her go from idea to a working product startlingly fast. The first version of Kazna was built and launched in under three weeks.
What Kazna Actually Does
Kazna is an AI-powered vault built for the way UAE households actually manage life admin not as individuals, but as families.
Users build household profiles and simply photograph a document; Kazna’s AI engine reads it, extracts the type, the holder, and the expiry date, and files it automatically. A Gmail-connected scanner does the same for subscriptions, pulling recurring charges out of the inbox and laying them out in one place, in one currency, so families can finally see what they’re actually paying for. Smart alerts fire well ahead of every deadline, not the day something expires, but early enough to act. And in an emergency, a secure Emergency Access feature can generate an instantly shareable record of critical documents and medical information, no digging through folders required.
It’s built on UAE Pass, the country’s national digital identity system: a deliberate choice that let Kazna plug into trusted government infrastructure from day one rather than build a workaround around it.
This is the part where most households realize they need it too. Kazna is live now, free to start. Download Kazna and see what’s quietly expiring in your own household right now.
Turning Heads at the Create Apps Championship
Kazna’s early traction hasn’t gone unnoticed. Out of more than 10,000 applicants, Sarah and her team advanced to become finalists in Dubai Chambers’ Create Apps Championship: one of the region’s most competitive platforms for mobile app builders, entrepreneurs, and innovators.
For a founder who built her MVP in under three weeks, on largely her own conviction, the finalist run was validation that the problem, and the way Kazna solves it, resonates far beyond her own household.
Building Trust With Government, Not Around It
What sets Kazna apart from the reminder apps and subscription trackers already on the market is how deliberately it’s being built alongside the institutions that actually govern this space. Kazna is in active collaboration with the UAE’s Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority (TDRA) on deeper UAE Pass integration, and has opened early discussions with the Central Bank of the UAE around the country’s Open Finance framework.
It’s an unusual position for a pre-launch consumer app to be in, but it reflects Sarah’s belief that a product asking families to trust it with visas, IDs, and financial data has to earn that trust structurally, not just through good design.
Before Kazna had a single paying user, more than 1,000 UAE households had already joined its waitlist, families who recognized the same problem Sarah had lived through and wanted in early.
What’s Next for Kazna
The UAE is only the starting point. Sarah’s plan is to prove the model at home first: real retention, real households, real institutional partnerships, before replicating it across the GCC in order of market readiness, starting with Saudi Arabia, where Kazna will extend its architecture to integrate with Nafath, the Kingdom’s national digital identity system.
It’s a deliberate, sequenced approach from a founder who has raised and built before, and who is now doing it again.
Download Kazna Today
Sarah Aboughaida’s story is still being written, but the app she built out of a personal scare is already live, already trusted by hundreds of early households, and already backed by some of the UAE’s most credible institutions.
If you’ve ever lost track of a renewal date, forgotten a subscription, or scrambled to find a document when it mattered most, you already know the problem Kazna was built to solve.
Download Kazna today and put your household’s documents, subscriptions, and renewal dates in one place, before the next deadline sneaks up on you.
Follow Sarah Aboughaida Abomar on Instagram and Kazna
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