Welcome to the Founding MENA newsletter, bringing you the top stories from across the region every week.
I hope you find the newsletter insightful, but I’m always open to feedback and suggestions. Let’s get into it!
💰 Investment Rounds
🇦🇪 1001 raised $30M in Series A led by Lux Capital. See more here.
🇦🇪 Whiteshield secured $15M in private credit facility from Ruya Partners. See more here.
🇦🇪 Maalexi raised $2.8M in an oversubscribed round led by Tawuniya. See more here.
🇪🇬 BrainsMingle raised $400K in seed from BasharSoft Group. See more here.
📰 Startup News
Tabby has secured both Consumer Finance and SME Finance licences from the Saudi Central Bank – SAMA.
Tabby started as a buy-now, pay-later platform. With 25 million registered users and 65,000+ business partners across the GCC, it is already one of the region's most widely adopted fintech products.
These two licences mark the moment it becomes something more than that. The Consumer Finance licence allows Tabby to offer financing of up to SAR 50,000 (~$13k) over 12 months.
This moves it into the kind of high-value purchases that BNPL was never designed for: furnishing a home, booking a holiday, funding a course, purchasing a used vehicle.
Early merchant partners include noon, IKEA, Fitness Time, Almosafer, flynas, and Almanea Co.
Critically, all financing is structured on a Shariah-compliant Murabaha model, with a fixed cost disclosed upfront, no compounding charges, and no late fees.
Tabby previously graduated from SAMA's regulatory sandbox before receiving its BNPL licence in 2025. Obtaining consumer and SME finance licences requires meeting SAMA's full compliance, security, and customer protection standards.
Tabby is no longer competing with other BNPL platforms. It is competing with consumer finance providers, banks, and business lending products. The addressable market has expanded significantly.
Saudi Arabia is one of the region's fastest-growing fintech markets, with Vision 2030 explicitly targeting a diversified consumer finance ecosystem.
Dubai Founders HQ and Antler have launched the Entrepreneur Academy.
The Entrepreneur Academy is a six-week programme for anyone who wants to start a business but doesn't know where to begin.
That last part is the important bit. Not for founders who are already building. Not for people with a deck and a co-founder.
This is for the person who has the ambition and the idea, but hasn't taken the first step yet.
The programme covers opportunity identification, idea validation, building with AI tools, and what it actually takes to launch a venture.
All delivered through a combination of online and in-person sessions by founders, investors, and operators from Antler's global network, alongside technology leaders from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and NVIDIA.
Participants who continue building get fast-tracked through the application process for the Dubai Founders HQ and Antler Residency, which already launched its first cohort with founders from around the world choosing to build from Dubai.
Magnus Grimeland put it well: "exceptional founders can come from anywhere, but too often the barrier isn't talent or ambition, it's simply not knowing where to start."
Given D33's ambition to scale 30 unicorns from Dubai, widening the top of the founder funnel is exactly the right place to invest.
Which Universities does Careem hire its talent from?
+800 Careem Alumni have gone on to build their own companies, collectively raising over $1.5bn for these companies.
But where did these talented operators come from in the first place?
I used Crustdata to analyse 1,624 Careem employees to see where the team earned their bachelor's degrees.
Here are the top universities that produced the most Careem talent so far:
National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences (FAST): 78 alumni
Karachi University: 55 alumni
Cairo University: 44 alumni
University of Jordan: 44 alumni
Lahore University of Management Sciences: 39 alumni
University of the Punjab: 36 alumni
Ain Shams University: 32 alumni
Alexandria University: 29 alumni
Five AI startups from have completed Kernel Camp by Propeller's.
Kernel Camp is Propeller's inaugural eight-week Silicon Valley residency programme for deep-tech founders from MENA.
The five companies, selected from the top 3% of applicants:
🇹🇳 OORB Open Organic Robotics — robotics observability platform that captures every robot run, scores reliability, and identifies what changed when behaviour break.
🇲🇦 Eli by Techbible — AI Stack Manager that maps every SaaS tool and AI agent, tracks spend and usage, and shows what software is actually doing the work.
🇯🇴 Firstflow — in-chat onboarding platform guiding users from first message to full adoption through structured widgets embedded in the agent interface.
🇪🇬 NexGuards — AI-powered social engineering and cyber attack simulation platform for enterprise security awareness training.
🇲🇦 FlowBrave — intelligent operations platform that turns static processes into dynamic, AI-guided workflows.
Throughout the residency, founders received direct mentorship from executives and operators at OpenAI, Meta, Airbnb, JP Morgan, Lux Capital, Mozilla Ventures, and Plug and Play.
The programme is built on a premise that's been consistently proven right across the MENA ecosystem: the founders are ready, and the networks, not the talent, have been the gap.
Bringing MENA founders into the operating culture, technical communities, and investor relationships of Silicon Valley for eight weeks is not the same as sending them to a conference.
Propeller manages a $50 million Fund III and is already preparing the second edition of Kernel Camp. More cohorts are coming.
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: foundingmena20.
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