Buying a used car in the Gulf used to mean five browser tabs: two classifieds sites, three dealer sites, each with its own filters and none with a price you could trust. Seez put all of it behind one search. Every car for sale in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, de-duplicated and comparable, with a fair-market valuation and a depreciation forecast on each one — and a camera button that identified a car you’d just walked past and showed you what it was worth and where to buy one.
I built the Android app.
What the app did
- One search, every site. Listings from across the country’s car sites in a single results list with a single set of filters — make, model, year, mileage, price, seller type — and direct contact with the seller from the listing.
- Shazam for cars. Photograph a car and Seez identified the make and model, showed the fair market price and depreciation curve, and listed similar cars for sale nearby.
- Price intelligence. Every listing carried a valuation against the market, so a good deal looked like one and an overpriced one didn’t hide.
- Hot deals, dealer packages, leasing. Curated deals per market, pre-owned offers from official dealerships, and leasing packages, alongside the classifieds.
- Financing without leaving the app. A loan calculator with a partner bank: monthly payment, down payment, interest, total cost — then the application itself.
The company behind it
Seez was founded in 2015 by brothers Tarek and Andrew Kabrit, started in Lebanon and grew up in Dubai. The app launched in the UAE in November 2017, went to number three in the UAE App Store within days, and by its $6 million Series A in early 2020 had about a million users and the region’s largest car catalogue — roughly half a million listed cars across the UAE, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The Android app alone passed 500,000 downloads.
The founders then took what they had learned about pricing and inventory and turned it toward the dealers: the consumer apps were retired in January 2025, and in February 2025 Pinewood Technologies, backed by Lithia Motors, acquired Seez for $46.2 million to roll its dealer AI out across a global network.
What it took on Android
A marketplace app lives or dies on the results list. It has to render thousands of listings from heterogeneous sources as if they came from one, filter them without a spinner, load images fast on the mobile networks of three countries, and keep the user’s saved cars and searches in sync. The camera flow adds a second discipline — capture, upload, recognise, and present a result quickly enough that it feels like magic rather than a form submission. Getting both right on the range of Android hardware common in the region was the job.
