More often than not, Almaha Almuhairi is either the youngest in the room, the only woman, or the only Emirati. Sometimes, she’s all three.
It’s a position that could easily feel isolating — but the INSEAD MBA graduate has turned that into a power move, something that may have to do with a childhood that revolved around computers and plants.
She was not allowed to use computers as a kid – but went on to pursue computer science
Almuhairi grew up in a home where computers were, until her 12th birthday, strictly off-limits. Her parents, products of a more cautious generation, even wrote letters to her school to exempt her from computer class.
The result was predictable: she became even more curious. Obsessed, even. At one point, she took apart her family home’s hulking desktop only to put it back together – within hours, by herself.
Her father noticed. The prohibition against computers quietly dissolved.
That early instinct to break things and put them back together again would define her entire future. She even went on to study computer science at university.
But somewhere between the lecture halls and the strain she felt from too much blue light, she noticed something: she was spending 16-plus hours a day looking at screens.
She needed a hobby that got her hands dirty. She tried art. She tried sports. Then a childhood memory surfaced. She had loved growing things.
So, she picked up gardening again — but this time it wasn’t decorative plants. It was food.
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How a pandemic rooftop garden blew up into a business
What started as a personal experiment on her rooftop during the pandemic eventually became a viral moment. She’d shared a quick video with friends showing how she’d turned the space into a greenhouse… and it spread way beyond her group chat. Even government officials reached out.
Being able to grow food in the UAE is a big deal. This is a country without food security. Over 85% of its food is imported which means whenever there are disruptions to global supply chains, price, and exchange rates, it’s hard to access to sufficient safe and nutritious food.
The UAE’s food fragility is likely exacerbated due to the Israel-Iran war, as the closure of the strait of Hormuz is further intensifying risks of food shortages.
Almuhairi had been preaching about this for years. She joined competition after competition during her undergraduate studies — startup weekends, bootcamps, pitching events.
In 2015, she won the prestigious Think Science national competition, pitching a smart home refrigerator designed for growing microgreens. She did it without a university representative, nearly got expelled for missing a week of class to attend, and ended up receiving encouragement from the Crown Prince of Dubai himself.
The business (Mahaya’s Farm) that emerged from that rooftop video is now five years old. Her soil product, Mahaya’s Super Potting Mix, has been best-in-category since its launch. She even has a patented product, the TerraPod, a pot that’s tech-enabled and designed to improve plant growth.
In any case, Almuhairi has built an online-first business model from the ground up, targeting home growers like herself at a time when the world had retreated indoors and retail foot traffic had evaporated. It was a strategic bet that paid off.
So, why the need to pursue an MBA still?
After years of founding and running ventures, alongside a stint at Accenture as a management consultant, Almuhairi made a decision that surprised some people: she signed up for INSEAD’s MBA programme.
Most MBA candidates arrive hoping to break into consulting or finance. Going against the grain, Almuhairi arrived wanting to leave consulting behind entirely.
Although she already had experience as a founder, she was honest about what she lacked: formal business foundations. She understood ROI, read her own invoices, managed the numbers.
But she wanted the credibility and the vocabulary to stand in front of investors and VCs — people who had questioned her qualifications, who had wondered aloud how someone without an agriculture background and without a business degree could lead an agri-tech company.
An INSEAD MBA would give her that extra credibility – and then some.
The choice of school was also deliberate. A one-year programme with campuses spanning Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, INSEAD aligned precisely with her five-year plan. She had no interest in programmes anchored in the US, as her business was rooted in the Gulf and targeted toward global markets that mirror the countries that INSEAD’s cohort come from.
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Being the woman in the room
Almuhairi graduated in July 2024. As her business, Mahaya’s, is still in the building stages, she has chosen to continue with a corporate job and is working at Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Technology, Almuhairi notes, is famously male-dominated. Agriculture presents a different paradox: the United Nations estimates that the majority of the world’s farmers are women, yet it is men who disproportionately reap the economic rewards.
As an agri-tech founder, this leaves Almuhairi in a unique position.
She has long experienced the double-edged reality of being visible as a woman in STEM. At early bootcamps and competitions, she was sometimes selected not entirely on merit but because organisers wanted female representation. She resented it.
She didn’t want to be a token — she wanted to walk into rooms that had other women in them.
That said, she is pragmatic about advantage. In the UAE today, she argues, women in professional and entrepreneurial contexts often hold structural advantages over their male peers. After all, men face mandatory military service after graduation, while government initiatives are actively channelling resources toward women in STEM. She takes none of that for granted, but she doesn’t apologise for it either.
You take the advantages available to you, she says, and you build from there.
Her advice to women looking to start businesses is characteristically direct: don’t engineer a problem to solve. Look at your own life. Look at the gaps that frustrate you daily, the ones that men around you may not even notice.
The best businesses, she believes, are built by people who have lived the problem — not by people searching for one needlessly just to be a founder.
Almaha Almuhairi is still, often, the youngest in the room, the only woman, the only Emirati. But she’s also, increasingly, the one setting the agenda.
