Founding MENA #35
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
- 🇪🇬 Zeal raised $10M in funding for global expansion. See more here.
- 🇦🇪 Sav raised $3.5M in pre-Series A led by Phoenix Venture Partners. See more here.
- 🇦🇪 Keep Converting raised $2M in pre-seed led by Nuwa Capital and COTU Ventures. See more here.
- 🇰🇼 Dawraty raised $2M in seed backed by Qatar Development Bank. See more here.
- 🇸🇦 Gaia raised $1.5M in pre-seed led by SEEDRA Ventures. See more here.
📰 Startup News
PayTabs has agreed to acquire Amazon Payment Services’ entire MENA operations in a ~$100M deal
Amazon Payment Services started life as PayFort, founded in 2013. Amazon absorbed it through its $580 million acquisition of Souq.com in 2017 and later rebranded it.
PayTabs has spent more than a decade building quietly. Founded in 2014 by Abdulaziz Fahad Al-Jouf, backed early by Wa’ed Ventures, and largely absent from the regional fundraising headlines that dominated competitor conversations.
PayTabs has been assembling licences, bank connections, and proprietary infrastructure across payment processing, automated switching, and payouts.
The combined entity will process more than SAR 150 billion (approximately $40 billion) in annual transactions, spanning nine MENA markets and serving more than 3,500 merchants across Visa, Mastercard, mada, Knet, Meeza, and other local rails.
This deal follows acquisitions of TAPn’GO in April 2026, Digital Pay, Paymes, OGS PayLab, and full control of PayTabs Egypt in 2025.
Read more here.
Velents has entered Bahrain through a strategic partnership with stc Bahrain
Founded by Mohamed Gaber, Velents develops agentic AI for enterprises: autonomous digital agents that automate complex workflows, reduce manual processes, and support faster decision-making.
The company is already operating across Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and is now the first Arab firm in Anthropic’s global Claude Partner Network.
Bahrain is its third market.
Rather than establishing a standalone sales operation and building enterprise relationships from scratch, Velents is integrating its agentic AI product bundles directly into stc Bahrain’s existing B2B portfolio.
Enterprise customers in Bahrain can now access Velents’ AI agents through a single local provider, under a single agreement, within Bahrain’s national digital infrastructure and regulatory framework.
For stc Bahrain, this partnership positions the company among the first telecom operators in the region to offer specialised enterprise AI automation as part of its core B2B offering.
Not just connectivity, but agentic intelligence delivered on top of it.
The telco-as-AI-distributor model is still early in the GCC. If it works at scale, it becomes one of the cleanest market entry playbooks available for enterprise AI founders expanding across the region.
Read more here.
📰 Other News
A new fund dedicated to the Arab world’s creative industries has launched with $20 million in first-close commitments
Creative Investments Holding was founded by Mohamed Talaat Khalifa, a veteran luxury and brands executive, through his investment arm Leo Equities, in partnership with Onsi Sawiris, Ali Abubakr, and Egypt’s MSMEDA.
The thesis is one MTK stated directly: the region has world-class heritage, craftsmanship, and taste. What it has lacked is a patient, institutional home to grow its brands into international champions. Culture is our capital.
Creative Holding targets four interconnected creative domains: food and culinary experiences, hospitality, fashion and retail, and lifestyle and entertainment.
It will take controlling and strategic stakes, provide growth capital, and build operational infrastructure to help regional brands scale internationally.
The first pipeline includes a potential acquisition in the heritage food sector and the evaluation of properties for Casa Leo, Creative Holding’s proprietary boutique hotel concept.
Total fundraise target is $50 million.
Read more here.
🤝🏼 Tools for Founders
Founding MENA has partnered with CapQuest, MENA’s leading equity management platform.
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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 14 Sep 2026 on Substack
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