Rakam: Virtual US & UK Numbers

A lot of the internet assumes you have a US or UK phone number. Sign-up flows send a verification code by SMS, and if the field will not accept your country code, the service is simply closed to you.

For users across the Middle East and North Africa that is a daily obstacle. The workarounds are worse than the problem. Free disposable number sites recycle their inventory, so a code meant for you arrives on someone else's screen, and an account tied to a number you no longer control is an account you lose. Borrowing a number from someone abroad works until you need it again a year later.

What is missing is not a number. It is a number that stays yours.

A platform that gives a user a permanent US or UK number they keep, inside the app rather than on a shared web page.

The user picks a number, and incoming SMS arrives in the app. Verification codes land where the user is already looking, within the window before they expire. Because the number persists, it works for the second login and the password reset a year later, not just for the first sign-up.

It runs on the web and as a mobile app, so the number is reachable from whichever the user has open.

The interface speaks Arabic alongside English. The people this is for read both, and a verification flow that only ever addresses them in English is one more small signal that the service was not built with them in mind. Arabic sits in the product itself rather than in a translated copy of it.

The web application is built on Next.js, with Supabase handling authentication and data. The mobile app is built in React Native, so a single codebase serves iOS and Android.

Numbers are provisioned through a telephony provider, and inbound messages route to the account that owns the number. The timing constraint shapes this more than the volume does: a verification code is useful for a minute or two, so a message that arrives late has arrived for nothing. Delivery had to be immediate rather than eventually consistent.

The same number reaches both the web and the mobile app, so a user signing in on a laptop is not locked out because the code went somewhere else.

Four months from start to launch-ready.

The platform is built and complete across web and mobile: number provisioning, in-app SMS delivery, and accounts that keep the same number across both surfaces. Rakam is currently collecting early access sign-ups ahead of public launch.