Building the iTunes for spare parts

Hi, friends! 👋

The MENA region is an energy powerhouse, holding 60% of the world’s oil reserves and 30% of global gas reserves, contributing 40% of regional GDP.

Yet, despite its global significance, energy-focused startups in the region often go unnoticed.

Today, we’re remedying this, by honing in on the global energy spare parts market – an industry that may not necessarily be the most glamorous but is worth a staggering $90 billion, with the Middle East accounting for 35%.

Despite this scale, additive manufacturing (i.e. 3D printing) and digital inventory platforms – widely adopted in sectors like medical, aviation, and automotive – have only recently begun gaining traction in the energy space.

This is where MENA-based startup Immensa comes in. Founded in 2016 by Fahmi Al-Shawwa, the startup enables on-demand local manufacturing of spare parts, connecting companies with qualified local manufacturers through a digital blueprint platform.

Now, with $20 million in Series B funding secured in late 2023, led by Global Ventures and backed by Endeavor Catalyst Fund, EDGO, ECG, Shorooq Partners, and Green Coast Investments, Immensa is gearing up for expansion – with North America in its sights.

This week, I sat down with Immensa’s Founder and CEO, Fahmi Al-Shawwa, to learn more about how additive manufacturing is transforming the energy sector.

In our interview, we cover:

• 🔄 Lessons from printing everything before finding the right niche

• 🔗 How Immensa evolved into a full-stack digital supply chain company

• 🛢️ Why Immensa decided to double-down on oil & gas

•  📉 The fallout from past high-profile overhyped SPACs and IPOs

• 🔨 How to break through pilot purgatory in slow-moving industries

• ⚙️ The biggest misconceptions about additive manufacturing

• 🗺️ Why maintaining culture across borders is so tough

• 🎯 Where Immensa is heading next – IPO, acquisition, or… ?

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Actionable insights 🧠 🛠️

If you only have a few minutes to spare, here's what investors, operators, and founders should know about Immensa and scaling deeptech.

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Okay, let’s dig into it 👇

How would you describe what Immensa is today? 

To keep it simple—what we do is: We enable on-demand local manufacturing of spare parts. How? We've built a tech platform where companies can store their digital assets (spare part blueprints), and it connects them to qualified local manufacturers.

The easiest analogy I use—especially when explaining to my kids—is:

"Do you know how iTunes works? Back in the day, you’d take a CD, upload it into iTunes, and then have all the songs stored digitally? You could just click and download the track whenever you wanted."

That’s exactly what we’re doing—but for spare parts.

We digitise them, store them on a platform, and when a company needs one, they can just press a button and send the file to a local manufacturer to produce it on demand.

Many founders struggle with timing. Was Immensa ‘too early’ when you launched, or was 2016 the perfect moment?

It definitely wasn’t the perfect moment—but honestly, there's never a perfect moment. In my 30 years of working, I’ve never seen anyone perfectly time a market.

You're either too early or too late. I always tell my wife when she wants to start something, there’s no such thing as too early—you just start and hope you can sustain it until the market catches up.

So yes, we probably leaned on the side of being too early, but if we hadn’t started then, I don’t think we would have been able to get to where we are today. It took us a solid three to four years just to figure out the right business model.

That’s something I wanted to touch on. Immensa initially explored everything from prosthetics to racing boats before pivoting to oil and gas. What led to that shift, and what lessons did you take from the early years?

When we started off, it was really about how this technology could be utilised. We knew it was interesting and valuable, but we needed to figure out where the strongest value proposition lay.

I spent about nine months studying the technology, looking at what had been done with it in Europe and the US. But back in 2014-2015, most of the models out there were jack-of-all-trades service bureaus—printing everything for everyone.

So, we initially set up as a service bureau with the goal of producing anything for anyone. And for the first year or so, we went down that path—a small team focused on polymer printing. Looking back, it was an amazing learning experience. We printed everything and anything to generate revenue and, in the process, gained critical insights into the manufacturing industry, the technology itself, and the regional landscape.

One key takeaway was that you can’t just say you’re a manufacturer or service bureau for every industry. We realised that 3D printing is just a manufacturing technology—what really matters is how you apply it. The hardware is never the differentiator; it’s how you use it that defines the value proposition.

Every time we tried to print something new, we had to deeply understand the product first. I remember a company came to us wanting to design and 3D print a life-saving drone. They provided designs, specs—everything. But we couldn’t just print it.

First, we had to understand aerodynamics, what affects a drone’s performance, and spend two weeks studying the product. Once we figured that out, designing and producing it only took two days.

It was the same with a dentist who had created an innovative eye gear device. We had to spend 4-5 weeks understanding his requirements before actually producing it, which then only took a few days.

That was our aha moment. We realised that if we wanted to scale, we needed to specialise. We couldn’t be everything for everyone—it would never work. That was the turning point that led us to focus on a single sector.

And what was it about the energy sector in particular that made you say, “Okay, this is where we double down”?

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