Founding MENA #26
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
- 🇦🇪 Keyper raised $11M in Series A led by Speedinvest. See more here.
- 🇦🇪 AVELIN AI raised $3.7M in pre-seed from angel investors. See more here.
- 🇸🇦 Uvera closed a seed round from Morgan Stanley Inclusive & Sustainable Ventures, LAB7, and Core Vision. See more here.
- 🇦🇪 Takeem received undisclosed strategic investment from Dubizzle Group Ventures. See more here.
- 🇦🇪 Planno raised undisclosed strategic investment from Incubayt Investments. See more here.
📰 Startup News
Noon Education has acquired Almakhfi, a Saudi platform that has helped more than 250,000 students prepare for Qudurat and Tahsili national examinations.
Founded in 2013 by Mohammed Aldhalaan and Aziz Alsaeed, Noon Academy already combines live classes, AI-powered learning tools, and skills-based education across core academic subjects, English, programming, robotics, and drone technologies.
The platform is deeply embedded in how Saudi students learn. Almakhfi adds the layer for specialised, high-stakes national exam preparation.
For Saudi middle and high school students, Qudurat and Tahsili scores are consequential. They determine university admission and shape long-term outcomes.
By embedding Almakhfi's exam preparation content into Noon Academy's AI layer, students can now move from subject learning to exam readiness within a single personalised journey rather than switching platforms and losing continuity.
This acquisition follows Noon Academy's $41 million Series B led by Wa'ed Ventures and RAED Ventures.
Read more here.
Techstars and Emirates NBD have announced a strategic partnership to accelerate enterprise-grade AI and fintech solutions across the MENAT region.
This is an "Acceleration-to-Enterprise" model. Not mentorship. Not a demo day. A direct commercial pathway for high-growth AI and fintech startups to be integrated into Emirates NBD's actual banking infrastructure ...
All nine million active customers, 13 countries, and AED 1.164 trillion in total assets!
The focus areas are compliance, wealth management, SME banking, and capital markets.
Agentic fintech that solves real enterprise use cases and delivers bottom-line impact. Emirates NBD already manages over 50 active AI use cases internally and was the only bank to achieve top three performance across Talent, Innovation, and Leadership in the inaugural Evident AI Index for Banks, Middle East and Africa.
For Techstars, this partnership brings their global pipeline of over 11,000 founders a front-row seat to one of the most dynamic financial markets in the world.
For Emirates NBD, it brings access to the next wave of agentic finance innovation before it matures elsewhere.
Dubai is home to nearly 60% of all GCC fintech companies. The D33 agenda has a stated goal of ranking Dubai among the top four global financial centres by 2033.
Techstars' portfolio includes more than 3,000 companies with a combined market cap exceeding $100 billion.
Read more here.
📰 Other News
Which universities built the Souq.com talent base?
Before Amazon acquired it for $580 million in 2017, Souq.com was the Middle East's original e-commerce giant.
Its alumni went on to be founders, operators, and leaders across the entire MENA tech scene. But many of you asked where all that talent came from in the first place.
I used Crustdata to analyse 2,203 Souq.com employees and alumni to find where they earned their bachelor's degrees.
The top universities that produced the most Souq talent:
- Cairo University — 143 alumni
- Helwan University Cairo — 97 alumni
- Ain Shams University — 95 alumni
- University of Jordan — 90 alumni
- Yarmouk University — 28 alumni
- Alexandria University — 28 alumni
- Al-Azhar University — 26 alumni
- Princess Sumaya University for Technology — 23 alumni
Souq was built with Egyptian and Jordanian engineering talent. Cairo University alone produced more of the team than the next two universities combined.
Three Egyptian universities in the top four. Two Jordanian universities rounding out the list.
This is a signal about where the depth of technical and commercial talent in the Arab world has been quietly sitting for decades.
Public universities in Cairo and Amman, producing graduates who went on to build one of the region's most consequential companies from the ground up.
This is why I think local talent is the biggest overlooked and misunderstood advantage the region has!
Oman and Jordan have jointly launched a $100 million investment company, the Jordanian Oman Investment Company.
The Oman Investment Authority and Jordan's Social Security Investment Fund are each contributing an equal share into the new entity.
The vehicle will invest across communications and information technology, agriculture and food, medical equipment and pharmaceuticals, energy, mining, tourism, and logistics.
Two things stand out here.
First, the OIA's track record of building bilateral investment platforms is significant. Similar structures now exist with Qatar, Türkiye, China, India, Spain, and Kazakhstan.
Second, Jordan's SSIF as a co-anchor is the right choice for this kind of vehicle. Jordan's Social Security Fund manages one of the country's largest pools of institutional capital, with a mandate to generate returns that sustain the fund over the long term.
For founders and businesses operating in either country, this vehicle represents a new source of long-term capital that explicitly identifies both markets as investment destinations
Read more here.
🤝🏼 Tools for Founders
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All of our readers can get 20% off their first year with CapQuest using the code: foundingmena20.
That’s all for this week, thanks! Sam.
First published 13 Jul 2026 on Substack
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