News

Ovasave Empowers Women To Tackle Difficult Fertility Choices

The UAE-based startup helps women to test their fertility at home and connects them to a network of clinics offering egg-freezing procedures.

Published

3 years ago

August 28, 2023

Nour Nasir

Ovasave

Abu Dhabi-based Ovasave is on a mission to empower women to take control of their fertility. Founded by Torkia Mahloul and Majd Abu Zant, the startup seeks to ease the complexity of freezing eggs while encouraging women to start testing their ovarian reserves at thirty years of age to improve their chances of becoming pregnant in the future.

Ovasave’s digitized process is centered around a $100 FDA-approved self-administered home hormone test, followed by a remote consultation by a doctor from a vetted fertility clinic network. Depending on the results and the consultation outcome, patients can opt for an egg-freezing package from one of the clinics in the network.

ovasave home testing kit

“Access to fertility services is a major issue. Women are delaying having children, so their fertility is declining, but they are not acting on it because of a lack of awareness […] and because the fertility journey is fragmented and complex,” Ms Mahloul says.

Recent changes to reproductive health laws in the United Arab Emirates now allow single and married women to preserve eggs for both social and medical reasons (including pursuing education or career advancement or undergoing cancer treatments).

According to co-founder Abu Zant, freezing eggs costs around Dh25,000 per cycle, with storage averaging another Dh1,500 per year. In the UAE, frozen eggs can be legally stored for five years, with an option to extend by an additional five years.

Also Read: LVL Wellbeing Receives $10 Million Investment To Scale Operations

Ovasave is partnering with eight UAE fertility clinics and twenty IVF specialists. Users will be able to rate doctors so that other women can compare the reviews when they book a consultation.

So far, the co-founders have invested $400,000 into the startup and are seeking to raise up to $2 million over the coming six months. The funds will be used for technical development, recruitment, and general market growth.

News

Visa’s Return To Syria Starts With A Test And A Bank In Lebanon

Foreign visitors will be the first users to benefit, but whether Syria’s own banks and cardholders follow is still an open question.

Published

2 weeks ago

August 27, 2026

Dana Saadeh

visa's return to syria starts with a test and a bank in lebanon

Visa is returning to Syria. Its first live international card transaction in the country was a test rather than a launch, and the milestone event ran through a Lebanese bank.

The acquirer (the bank on the merchant’s side of a card payment) was Fransabank Lebanon, with Paymera as the other named partner. Nadim Moujaes, who heads a Fransabank Group subsidiary, describes the test as both the culmination of “longstanding efforts to link Syria back to international payment networks” and “the first step in a larger path”.

Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa makes the first electronic payment in Syria using a @Visa card at a store in Damascus, following the lifting of US sanctions on Syria. pic.twitter.com/lpAN7nQ6Fc

— Tech Magazine (@TechMGZN) August 27, 2026

“We are excited to have successfully tested live transactions today as we plan to enable international visitors to use their Visa cards while in Syria,” says Leila Serhan, Visa’s senior vice president and group country manager for the North Africa, Levant and Pakistan region. Although a significant first step, that plan doesn’t come with a hard date for when a visitor’s card will work normally.

Mohammed Safwat Raslan, governor of the Central Bank of Syria, says the test paves the way for international card acceptance in Syria and that maintaining strong compliance, risk management and operational controls will remain essential. Serhan likewise stresses that Visa has worked within applicable legal, regulatory and compliance requirements. For a test transaction, it seems there was a great deal of attention paid to the rules, with the entire operation being carefully managed.

Also Read: Lebanon’s 5G Era Begins With 150 Stations And A $1M Budget

The test is the latest step in a sequence that began in December 2025, when Visa announced a strategic roadmap to support Syria’s integration into the global digital economy. In February 2026 it hosted its first industry gathering of banks, ecosystem partners and policymakers in Damascus and, the same month, signed an agreement with Syria’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in San Francisco.

Michel Kattouah, Paymera’s CEO, called the test “the return of international card acceptance,” but while that’s positive news, there’s no word yet on when a Syrian bank will issue a Visa card to a Syrian customer.