Founding MENA #33
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
- 🇦🇪 Swvl secured $13M in private placement led by Coefficient LP. See more here.
- 🇦🇪 Stellaria raised $6.8M in seed funding from angel investors. See more here.
- 🇦🇪 Oro raised $3M in strategic funding led by MH Ventures and Mapleblock Capital. See more here.
- 🇦🇪 GMNSM raised $2M from VEYRA Capital and private investor. See more here.
- 🇸🇦 Raff raised $1.7M in pre-seed led by Vision Ventures. See more here.
📰 Startup News
The UAE has a new unicorn!
Fasset, the UAE-based stablecoin neobanking platform, has raised $68 million in a Series C led by Japan's SBI Investment, valuing the company at $1 billion.
This round follows a $51 million Series B in May 2026. That's $119 million raised in a single year. Total funding since inception now exceeds $150 million.
The numbers behind the platform put the valuation in context. $40 billion in annualised transaction volume. 3 million wallets. 125 countries. 1,000+ enterprise clients.
SBI, one of Japan's largest financial groups with investments spanning Ripple, Circle, and Morpho, is building what it calls an "SBI APAC Digital Economic Zone" anchored by on-chain settlement infrastructure.
Fasset's Own Network, which connects banks, telcos, payment providers, and liquidity sources across 100+ banking corridors, is precisely the kind of regulated cross-market infrastructure SBI needs inside that vision.
Read more here.
The UAE has granted Starlink a 10-year licence to provide satellite broadband services across the country.
This means Starlink opening services to consumers, businesses, and government entities beyond the maritime and aviation sectors where it previously operated.
The licence from TDRA marks a meaningful moment for UAE connectivity infrastructure. Not because it replaces what already exists the UAE’s fibre and 5G networks remain world-class, and in dense urban areas like Dubai and Abu Dhabi they will continue to outperform satellite on speed, latency, and reliability. But because it adds a third layer to national connectivity that didn’t exist before.
Think about the use cases that fibre and 5G struggle to serve efficiently: construction sites across remote desert development projects. Energy infrastructure spread across vast distances. Logistics networks operating in areas where terrestrial deployment is slow or expensive. Maritime transport. Aviation. Emergency response.
These are sectors where connectivity can be operationally critical and where the existing infrastructure has always had limits.
Under the new licence, Starlink can establish, operate, and manage a public satellite communications network delivering broadband internet to individuals, businesses, and government entities across the UAE.
The service operates within TDRA’s framework covering network security, information infrastructure protection, service quality, consumer rights, and data privacy. Satellite broadband as a regulated, integrated component of national digital infrastructure, not a parallel system running outside it.
Read more here.
📰 Other News
Aramco Ventures has co-led a $20 million seed round into Twin1 AI.
Investing alongside Bessemer Venture Partners and Tribeca Venture Partners, Twin1 builds personalised AI digital twins of employees.
Not a generic AI assistant. Not a shared company chatbot. A digital replica of you, trained on your emails, meetings, documents, and connected applications, that reflects your knowledge, your working context, and your professional relationships.
Your twin can answer questions on your behalf. Retrieve information from your systems. Coordinate tasks across platforms including Microsoft Teams, Slack, Outlook, Gmail, Google Drive, and SharePoint.
Crucially, your twin can communicate with other people’s twins, identifying the right colleagues, surfacing authorised information, and coordinating work across an organisation without requiring everyone to be in the room.
Digital twin technology has been used in industrial settings for decades. Virtual replicas of machines and systems used to simulate behaviour, predict failure, and optimise performance. Twin1 is applying that same concept to the most complex machine in any organisation: a person.
International law firms Linklaters, Orrick, and Dechert are already using the platform.
US lender Customers Bank. Energy company Aegis Energy. Highly regulated, high-stakes environments where information retrieval accuracy and permission control are non-negotiable. Twin1 has spent more than a year testing specifically in these environments.
Founded in 2025 by Lewis Liu, Tom Cahn, Huiting Liu, and Jonathan Budd, several of whom previously built enterprise AI at Eigen Technologies.
Twin1 will use the capital to expand teams in California and London and accelerate commercial development.
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 31 Aug 2026 on Substack
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