Founding MENA #34

Newsletter #34

Founding MENA · 7 Sep 2026 · 4 min read

Saudi Arabia Fintech

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

🇸🇦 COFE Tech secured $178M in pre-IPO funding from Wa’ed Ventures and Aditum Investment Management. See more here.
🇸🇦 FlyAkeed raised $25.15M in growth funding led by Sanabil Investments. See more here.
🇸🇦 Nayla raised $18M in pre-Series A from Idrisi Ventures and BLOMINVEST. See more here.
🇸🇦 Enhance raised $18.2M in equity and venture debt. See more here.
🇸🇦 Syarah raised $12M from Impact46. See more here.
🇸🇦 Sirdab raised $10M in Series A from Elm and BECO Capital. See more here.
🇸🇦 3C Coding School raised $3M in seed for Saudi expansion. See more here.
🇸🇦 Remedium raised $1.5M for sustainability accounting expansion. See more here.
🇦🇪 Rwaj raised $1.2M to scale live shopping marketplace. See more here.

📰 Startup News

Jordan’s Abwaab has acquired Egyptian edtech startup Eduact

Abwaab was founded in 2019 by Hamdi Tabbaa, Sabri Hakim, and Hussein AlSarabi to provide curriculum-aligned digital learning and assessment products across MENA.

It now operates across six markets. Earlier this year, it acquired Apex Education, an Egyptian international university admissions platform. Now it acquires Eduact.

Abwaab is building the infrastructure for Arabic education more broadly; think curriculum content, assessment, admissions pathways, and now the SaaS layer that powers independent teachers and learning centres.

Eduact was founded in Egypt in 2020 by Adham Hamed and Ali Hisham. The product is a SaaS platform that lets independent teachers and small learning centres manage video content, grading, payments, and workflows across both online and offline learning.

It’s the operational back-end that thousands of Egyptian educators have built their businesses on, without which they’d have to stitch together multiple disconnected tools.

Two acquisitions in eight months. Six markets. A platform that now spans student content, assessment, university admissions, and teacher infrastructure. Abwaab is building quietly and deliberately.

Salla has acquired Paylink to bring payments infrastructure natively inside its e-commerce platform

Salla has been the dominant platform for Saudi merchants building online stores for years.

Tens of thousands of businesses run on it. But payments, one of the most critical operational layers for any merchant, has always been handled through third-party integrations. This acquisition changes that.

Paylink was founded in 2017 by Ammar AlTwaijri and Abdulelah Alsayegh and holds a SAMA licence to provide e-commerce payment services.

What it brings isn’t just a payment gateway. It’s a Saudi regulatory footprint, a technical infrastructure built specifically for the Kingdom’s payment environment, and capabilities that directly address where Salla wants to take merchants next.

The three areas Salla gains from Paylink are specific:

First, point-of-sale expansion. SoftPOS technology that lets merchants accept payments on mobile devices wherever a sale happens, extending Salla’s relevance beyond the online store into physical retail.

Second, international payments. Paylink’s infrastructure supports multiple currencies and payment methods, giving Saudi brands built on Salla a clearer pathway to regional and global customers.

Third, native payment management. Instead of merchants toggling between Salla and a separate payments dashboard, the entire acceptance and reconciliation flow comes inside one platform.

Saudi Arabia’s e-commerce market is still growing fast. The merchants who scale on the most integrated infrastructure win.

📰 Other News

BitOasis has named Jonathan Rigg as its new CEO

Ola Doudin co-founded BitOasis in 2016. She built it from a two-person startup in a market that barely knew what Bitcoin was, through the full cycle of crypto’s boom-and-bust-and-rebuild, into a platform that has processed approximately $8.5 billion in spot trading volume and serves over one million customers across the UAE, Bahrain, and the wider MENA region.

Her departure from the CEO role deserves to be acknowledged before anything else.

The MENA crypto ecosystem has Ola Doudin’s fingerprints on it in ways that most people don’t fully appreciate.

She didn’t just build BitOasis, she helped build the regulatory frameworks, the institutional trust, and the cultural legitimacy that made digital assets a serious topic for regulators and investors across the GCC.

Jonathan Rigg takes over at a platform that is in a genuinely different position than it was even 18 months ago. Licensed in the UAE. Broker-dealer licensed in Bahrain by the Central Bank, with the launch of BitOasis Bahrain in May 2025.

An OTC desk serving institutional clients. Derivatives products approved and moving toward market launch. And the ongoing integration with CoinDCX, India’s leading crypto exchange, which acquired BitOasis in 2024, adding global depth behind a regional brand.

Rigg’s profile fits what this next phase needs. Nearly a decade in global banking and markets at HSBC and Deutsche Bank, primarily in prime brokerage and capital advisory.

Three years at Fuze Finance as part of the founding commercial team. Hands-on experience scaling regulated platforms, building commercial teams, and critically, monetising crypto infrastructure including OTC, stablecoin payments, and Banking as a Service.

🤝🏼 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.