Founding MENA #30
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
- 🇦🇪 Moove raised $250M in Series C led by Mubadala Investment Company. See more here.
- 🇦🇪 Longevium raised $7M in its first funding round led by undisclosed investors. See more here.
- 🇸🇦 RIME raised $2M+ in seed led by SEEDRA Ventures. See more here.
- 🇸🇦 MOZN secured undisclosed strategic investment from HUMAIN. See more here.
📰 Startup News
UAE-based Syrian entrepreneurs have launched My Syria App, Syria's first integrated tourism and lifestyle super app.
The app has been launched with the backing of Syria's Ministry of Tourism and full international payment infrastructure.
Founded by Rami Kaiem, Feras Kaiem , Waseem Qudmani, and Kinan Madi, all based in the UAE, My Syria was built as the first platform in the country to enable cross-border digital payments through Apple Pay, Google Pay, Visa, Mastercard, and American Express.
Syria registered 3.52 million visitor arrivals in H1 2026, a 111% increase year-on-year. Tourism is visibly recovering, interest from regional visitors is accelerating, and the digital infrastructure to support it has historically been almost nonexistent.
The platform currently connects hotels, restaurants, transport services, tourist attractions, food delivery, and lifestyle experiences through a single app.
Eight services at launch, expanding to 40+ verified providers. A larger digital platform is planned across more services and wider geographic coverage inside Syria.
Syria's rebuild is beginning to happen digitally as well as physically.
Read more here.
Pemo has launched its first business account!
Built in partnership with Ruya Islamic Bank and structured as a Shariah-compliant Wakala deposit, the account offers up to 3.75% expected profit on surplus cash.
Idle cash earning a return, alongside day-to-day financial operations, all in one place is something large corporates have had access to for years.
For small businesses it's rarely existed.
Small businesses make up 94% of all companies in the UAE, employ 86% of the private sector workforce, and contribute an estimated 63.5% of non-oil GDP.
Yet despite being the backbone of the economy, they're consistently last in line for financial innovation.
Enterprise treasury tools, cash management products and integrated spend platforms historically required scale that most SMEs don't have.
Pemo has been closing that gap. 6,000+ businesses on the platform. $19 million in funding raised. 200+ product releases shipped. 4.8 on G2.
Read more here.
📰 Other News
Fawry was the first Egyptian tech company to reach a $1B valuation, and one of the few listed on the Egyptian Exchange.
The team that built Fawry are worth knowing, but where did the people who built it actually study?
Founding MENA worked with Crustdata to analyse 945 Fawry employees with a bachelor's degree on record and rank the universities that produced them:
- Cairo University: 205
- Ain Shams University: 125
- Helwan University Cairo: 115
- Alexandria University: 43
- Mansoura University: 35
- Minufiya University: 35
- October 6 University: 22
- Zagazig University: 20
The majority of them are all Egyptian public universities. Egypt's tech unicorn was built by local Egyptian talent.
Very few unicorns in MENA can claim to have this amount of local talent inside their teams.
Qatar Development Bank has invested in Multiverse Computing, Europe's newest AI unicorn, as part of its €500 million Series C, valued at €1.5 billion.
Doha becomes the company's regional headquarters.
Multiverse Computing didn't start as an AI company. It started as a quantum software company in Donostia, Spain in 2019.
Its deep expertise in quantum physics, specifically tensor networks, a mathematical framework borrowed from quantum mechanics, led it to discover something unexpected: those same techniques could be applied to compress large AI language models with extraordinary efficiency.
The result is CompactifAI, which can reduce the size of LLMs by up to 95% with only 2-3% accuracy loss.
For context, industry-standard compression techniques typically achieve 50-60% compression at the cost of 20-30% accuracy loss.
Since its Series B round in June 2025, the company has multiplied its annualised revenue by more than ten times.
Sales in Q1 2026 were 96 times higher than a year earlier.
The sovereign AI angle is where QDB's investment becomes strategically coherent. CompactifAI enables AI models to run on standalone devices independently of large-scale cloud servers, giving users greater sovereign control over their AI infrastructure.
For governments and enterprises in the GCC that want to deploy powerful AI without their data leaving the country, this is exactly the capability they've been looking for.
QDB has now invested in 40+ startups from 15 countries through Startup Qatar since 2024, with a QAR 1 billion portfolio target by 2030.
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: foundingmena20.
That’s all for this week, thanks! Sam.
First published 9 Aug 2026 on Substack
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