About

Built for the in-between

Neha Jakhar doesn't fit neatly into one industry — and that's exactly the point. This is the long version of how an engineer became a marketer, a founder, and eventually a builder of companies across Dubai's most competitive sectors.

Neha Jakhar in Dubai

Neha started out the way a lot of engineers do — trained to break big, ambiguous problems into systems that could actually be solved. What she didn't expect was how directly that training would translate into business: reading a market is not so different from reading a technical spec, and closing a sale is just another kind of debugging.

Over the past several years, that instinct has taken her through four ventures, five disciplines, and industries that rarely share a résumé — engineering, creative marketing, technology, sales and consulting. Along the way she has generated more than $5M in sales and worked with over 2,000 clients globally, in sectors ranging from business setup and real estate to marketing and tech.

She's Dubai-based, and the city shows up in how she works: fast-moving, cross-border, and unforgiving of anyone who treats "networking" as a substitute for actually delivering. Today she splits her time leading two companies — Prezlo, a tech-driven marketing company, and Nxtstar, a UAE venture spanning business setup and real estate consulting.

Why cross-industry, on purpose

Most careers specialize early and stay there. Neha's has done the opposite — and she'll tell you that's not scattershot, it's strategic. An engineering background means she can sit in a room with a product team and actually follow the roadmap. A background in creative marketing means she can sit in the next room with a brand team and know exactly what will and won't land with a customer. Sales experience means she knows what happens when both of those things meet a real buyer with a real budget. Each discipline sharpens the others — which is why her clients tend to come to her with problems that don't fit inside one department.

How she works

Whether she's advising a founder on UAE business setup, building a go-to-market plan for a tech client at Prezlo, or scoping a real estate deal at Nxtstar, the method is consistent: understand the system before you try to change it. That means fewer generic playbooks and more time spent actually inside the industry — talking to the people doing the work, not just the people managing it.


The journey so far

Four ventures, one thread running through all of them.

Venture 01
Cal's Candles
Neha's first venture, in handmade goods — built and run end to end, from product to sales. The place she first learned that "founder" means doing every job in the company until you can afford not to.
Venture 02
Taseer
An influencer marketing startup where Neha onboarded 150+ creators, learning the mechanics of a two-sided marketplace and what it actually takes to get brands and creators to trust a new platform. taseer.app
Venture 03
Prezlo
Founded to close the gap between technical teams and marketing teams — a tech-driven marketing company built on the idea that growth should be engineered, not guessed at. prezlo.io
Venture 04
Nxtstar
A Dubai-based venture helping founders and investors navigate business setup and real estate in the UAE — built from firsthand experience of how confusing that process can be without the right guidance. nxtstar.ae

Expertise, in depth

Five disciplines that show up in every project she takes on.

Engineering

Systems thinking applied to business problems, not just software — breaking down a messy market or a stalled sales process the same way you'd debug a piece of code: find the actual failure point, not the symptom.

Creative marketing

Brand and campaign strategy built to convert, not just impress — grounded in an engineer's instinct for measuring what's actually working versus what merely looks good in a deck.

Technology

Product and platform decisions made with real market feedback, from her time building Taseer's two-sided marketplace to advising Prezlo's clients on their own tech stacks.

Sales

Full-cycle deal-making — from first outreach to closed contract — refined across more than $5M in generated sales and 2,000+ client relationships spanning multiple industries and geographies.

Consulting

Advising founders and investors on market entry, structure and growth, particularly around UAE business setup and real estate — informed by having built and led ventures in those exact categories.

How she approaches the work

Three principles that carry across every venture and every client engagement.

Understand before you build

Every new industry gets treated as a system to learn first — not a market to move fast into. The groundwork is what makes the speed possible later.

Cross-pollinate disciplines

The best ideas in marketing often come from engineering, and the best ideas in sales often come from marketing. Keeping all of them in view at once is the advantage.

Do the unglamorous parts

Founders who skip the paperwork, the compliance, the follow-up — the parts nobody posts about — are the ones who end up rebuilding later. Neha doesn't skip them.

Want to work through your own next step?

Neha mentors founders and operators navigating similar cross-industry moves — from UAE business setup to scaling a sales motion.

Book a mentorship session