Founding MENA #36
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
- 🇸🇦 Barq raised $329.5M in Series A at $1.85B valuation from Noon Investments, Sohar International Bank and M20 Fund. See more here.
- 🇸🇦 Tabby raised $233M in Series F at $6.5B valuation led by Blue Pool Capital. See more here.
- 🇧🇭 Tarabut secured $50M in strategic financing from Riyad Bank and X-Tech Fund. See more here.
- 🇸🇦 Rize secured $50M facility from Jadwa Investment. See more here.
- 🇸🇦 BRKZ secured $31M ($13M Series B equity and $18M growth debt) led by Wa’ed Ventures and 500 Global. See more here.
- 🇪🇬 Synapse Analytics raised $13M in Series B led by Partech. See more here.
📰 Startup News
Huspy has acquired LuxuryX Agents
Huspy now facilitates approximately $1 billion in transactions every month and handles approximately 25% of residential mortgages in the UAE.
Its brokerage network has grown 75% since January 2026.
The business just recorded its strongest month ever. All-time highs across revenue, transactions, listings, viewings, offers, conversion rates, conveyancing, and recruitment simultaneously.
LuxuryX is a specialist team with more than two decades of luxury market expertise across Dubai, Australia, and the UK, built specifically around Dubai's premium residential communities.
Next month, Huspy launches Huspy Signature, its dedicated luxury real estate brand offering a curated portfolio of premium properties across the UAE, Spain, and Italy, combined with mortgage advisory and integrated financing.
LuxuryX's team, relationships, and market knowledge become the foundation of that brand.
Huspy was founded in Dubai in 2020 as a mortgage platform.
Today it operates in 15 cities across four markets, has raised approximately $200 million from Sequoia Capital, Balderton, Founders Fund, and Fifth Wall.
The platform now runs an AI-native agent that puts listings, leads, valuations, buyer matching, and market intelligence into a single tool for every agent in the network.
Read more here.
Lendo and Austria's Quantic Financial have launched a SAR 750 million ($200 million) institutional capital programme to finance Saudi SMEs.
This is an Austrian asset manager bringing foreign direct investment into Saudi Arabia's SME sector through Lendo's SAMA-regulated origination infrastructure, and then structuring Shariah-compliant investment products from those assets for international investors abroad.
Saudi SME financing has historically been almost entirely funded by domestic capital.
Quantic's model creates a repeatable bridge: foreign institutional capital in, Shariah-compliant asset-backed products out.
If this works at scale, it becomes a template for channelling European and international capital into Saudi Arabia's most underserved lending segment.
Saudi SMEs have a strong demand for working capital but limited access to bank credit.
Lendo is SAMA-regulated, has a track record that earned Quantic's confidence, and has the origination infrastructure to deploy SAR 750 million efficiently.
The programme was announced at Money20/20 Middle East in Riyadh.
Read more here.
📰 Other News
aramco has produced 688 founders that raised over $300M in total funding.
I worked with Crustdata to map some of the companies founded or co-founded by Aramco Alumni:
- Gridware - $97M - Abdulrahman Bin Omar
- Lucidya - $39M - Zuhair Khayyat
- Nearpay - $20M - Hamzah Al Ghamdi
- PayTabs - $20M - Abdulaziz Al Jouf
- Nejree - $19M - Ibrahim Al Mogren
- Builtop - $11M - Ayman Aljohani
- penny - $10M - Mohamad Ibrahim
- Sirdab - $10M - Abdulrahman Alnamlah
- Telgani - $10M - Abdulkader Almkinzy
- WIDMO - $9M - Tomasz Trzesniowski
- Munjz - $7M - Abdullah AlDaij
- Tamra Capital - $7M - Mohannad Qandeel
- Strataphy - $6M - Ahmed Alhani
- Nabt - $5M - Abdullah Alotaibi
- Predictiva - $4M - Maysara Hammouda
- CQR - $3M - Naser Aldossary
And this is still only scratching the surface.
There are 688 alumni founders across 767 companies, and many of them have either raised millions in funding or built impressive bootstrapped companies.
Snowflake has launched its Snowflake for Startups programme in the UAE.
The challenge most AI startups face is what happens the moment an enterprise customer asks about data governance, security architecture, and compliance.
Founders building on consumer-grade or improvised infrastructure hit a wall at exactly the moment they should be closing their first large customer.
Snowflake for Startups is designed to remove that wall.
UAE founders get access to the same AI data infrastructure used by more than 14,500 enterprises globally from day one, rather than retrofitting it later when the commercial stakes are higher.
The practical offering:
- Production-ready AI infrastructure on Snowflake's AI Data Cloud, with Cortex REST API enabling cost-efficient switching between frontier AI models within a secure environment
- Access to 12,600+ potential customers through the Snowflake Marketplace, a direct route to enterprise buyers without building a sales motion from scratch
- Credits, engineering support, and go-to-market guidance through the Snowflake Startup Accelerator
- Access to capital and strategic backing through Snowflake Ventures
Sarwa, the UAE investment platform, is already in production on Snowflake, using it to unify data from databases, front-end systems, customer service platforms, and compliance tools.
For founders building in the UAE who haven't explored Snowflake for Startups, it’s worth a look.
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 21 Sep 2026 on Substack
The week in MENA tech, every Monday. Free.
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