Founding MENA #24
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💰 Investment Rounds
- 🇸🇦 Terraxy raised $3M in seed funding led by Wa’ed Ventures. See more here.
- 🇦🇪 Rentify raised $2M in seed to launch Earn AI platform. See more here.
- 🇦🇪 Revora raised $2M in seed co-led by i2i Ventures and Oraseya Capital. See more here.
- 🇹🇳 RoboCare raised undisclosed six-figure funding from 216 Capital. See more here.
📰 Startup News
A Dubai fintech has just emerged from stealth with what it's calling the GCC's first AI-native personal finance management platform.
Numi was founded by Leni Andronicos and Usman Azim, with a team drawing on backgrounds from MIT, Oxford, Microsoft, IBM, Citi, J.P. Morgan, UBS, and Standard Chartered.
Most personal finance apps are built around information. They show you what you spent, tell you where you could save, and leave the actual work to you.
Numi's entire architecture is built around the premise that telling people what to do has never been the problem.
The company is building autonomous AI agents that act on a user's behalf: paying bills, optimising savings, investing spare cash, managing foreign exchange, and reducing debt, all without requiring the user to execute each step manually.
At the core of the platform is a proprietary Decision Engine built specifically around GCC financial behaviour, which is meaningfully different from Western market assumptions.
Local payment infrastructure, multi-currency FX requirements, Islamic finance considerations, and the reality that most personal finance products in this market were built elsewhere and imperfectly adapted.
Numi is based in the DIFC and has already been granted access to the UAE's Open Finance regulatory sandbox, regulated by the Central Bank of the UAE.
The founding team's background says a lot about the ambition.
Andronicos has scaled consumer platforms to millions of users across 70+ countries.
Azim spent 14 years building global infrastructure at Citi, including virtualising more than 10,000 business applications across the bank's international operations.
The access-and-execution gap in personal financial management is real. Most people don't have a wealth manager. Numi is building one that runs autonomously for everyone else.
Read more here.
Foodics has completed its full acquisition of Norma.
Foodics first took an initial stake in Norma in Q1 2025. Twelve months later, Norma's Analytics Agent and BI application have been adopted by more than 10,000 Foodics customer branches, and the full acquisition is now complete.
Norma was founded by George Henein and Anastasios Anastasiadis in Greece; the company launched the first natural language querying BI application in the hospitality industry.
The tool lets any business user ask questions in plain language, get instant answers, and build custom dashboards without touching a single line of code.
For Foodics, which already processes over 6 billion orders across 40,000+ branches across the GCC and North Africa, the question was never whether AI mattered. It was who builds it and how fast.
Norma's team now joins Foodics' dedicated AI division, focused specifically on building the next generation of agentic AI for restaurant operations.
Agentic AI in hospitality is still early. The operators who adopt it first will make faster decisions, cut waste earlier, and protect margins more effectively than everyone else. Foodics is building for those operators.
Read more here.
📰 Other News
We need more founder factories like Souq.com
Souq.com was acquired by Amazon for $580 million in 2017, but its real legacy is the 150+ founders it produced.
I teamed up with Crustdata to track Souq alumni who went on to build their own companies. Using their People Search and Funding APIs, we found Souq alumni founders have collectively raised over $190 million for their startups.
Some of the companies founded by Souq alumni:
- Sylndr — $45.8M — Amr Mazen
- SellAnyCar.com — $45M — Saygin Yalcin
- WeRize — $41M — Vishal Chopra
- Grubtech — $35.6M — Omar Rifai
- Okadoc — $22M — Fodhil Benturquia
- GenWise — $3.5M — Nehul Malhotra
- Disty — $2M — Ahmed Abu Alasal
- Popcorn AI — $1.2M — Yousef Al Arif
- Mumerz — $1.2M — Amir Demian
- Zip24 — $1.2M — Asif Keshodia
- Quicko — $1.1M — Ahmad Abuquboh & Yousef Abusamak
The pattern is consistent with every great company that scales fast across complex markets. These operators turn to founders when they spot a problem worth solving.
They take the playbook, the network, and the scar tissue from operating at pace across MENA, and they go build the next thing.
Careem did it. Noon is doing it. Souq did it quietly, long before anyone started calling it a talent factory.
Read more here.
Qatar has just made it significantly easier for startups to access venture capital.
Invest Qatar, the country's investment promotion agency, has launched a Venture Capital Funding Module on the Invest Qatar Gateway, developed in collaboration with Qatar Investment Authority.
The module consolidates the entire VC discovery and application process into a single platform.
Startups can browse participating funds' investment focus and eligibility criteria, access value-added programmes, and submit pitches directly to fund managers, all in one place.
The initial cohort includes QIA-backed names that will be immediately recognisable to anyone active in global venture: B Capital, Greycroft, Speedinvest, Shorooq, and A-typical Ventures, among others.
Add the Tech Venture Fund from Qatar Science & Technology Park (QSTP) for early-stage local support, and the coverage across stage, sector, and geography is genuinely broad.
This sits on top of QIA's $3 billion Fund of Funds programme, one of the largest sovereign commitments to venture capital infrastructure in the region.
For any startup looking at the GCC as a market or base, Qatar has historically been underweighted relative to the UAE and Saudi Arabia in founder conversations, so this is worth a look (link in the comments below).
Read more here.
Abu Dhabi's MGX has closed what is one of the largest pools of capital ever raised purely to invest in artificial intelligence.
The total war chest is nearly $50 billion, drawn from regional sovereign wealth funds, global pension funds, and large institutional investors.
For the first time, Abu Dhabi leaned on outside investors to build this fund, and the money is already going out the door.
This shift matters because it makes MGX look less like a traditional Gulf sovereign fund and more like a global asset manager: raising outside capital, then investing alongside its Abu Dhabi backers.
MGX is barely two years old.
Its portfolio already spans frontier models, semiconductor infrastructure, and data centres, with stakes in OpenAI, Anthropic, and Elon Musk's xAI, alongside a $30 billion vehicle targeting data centres built in partnership with BlackRock, Microsoft, and NVIDIA.
The context for why a fund of this size is necessary: training a leading AI model is extraordinarily expensive. OpenAI alone spent about $34 billion last year, and the compute bills show no sign of easing.
Abu Dhabi has put itself at the centre of that race deliberately. It has the cash, cheap energy for data centres, and close ties to the biggest names in global tech.
MGX is racing toward a target of more than $100 billion in assets under management.
Read more here.
🤝🏼 Tools for Founders
Founding MENA has partnered with CapQuest, MENA’s leading equity management platform.
CapQuest’s automatic SAFE tracker is a game-changer. Upload all your SAFEs at once and it instantly models dilution, tracks valuations, and turns fundraising scenarios from a spreadsheet nightmare into something you can run in minutes.
All of our readers can get 20% off their first year with CapQuest using the code: scalingmena20.
That’s all for this week, thanks! Sam.
First published 29 Jun 2026 on Substack
The week in MENA tech, every Monday. Free.
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