Founding MENA #10
Welcome to the Founding MENA newsletter, bringing you the top stories from across the region every week.
Before we get into it, I hope all of our MENA based readers are safe and well. As a resident of the UAE, I share the widely held desire for de-escalation of conflict across the region.
I hope you find the newsletter insightful, but I’m always open to feedback and suggestions. Let’s get into it!
💰 Investment Rounds
- 🇸🇦 Muhlah raised a $7M seed led by BIM Ventures. See more here.
📰 Startup News
Converted acquires Mitcha
US-based adtech startup Converted has acquired Mitcha, Egypt’s leading fashion e-commerce platform supporting local designers. Terms undisclosed.
Founded in 2024 by Mohamed Fergany, Converted operates an AI-powered advertising platform that manages marketing data, ad payments, and campaign execution across Google, Meta, TikTok, and other channels. The company serves thousands of merchants across Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Mitcha, founded in 2018 by Hilda Louca (Shark Tank Egypt investor), has built a strong community of Egyptian fashion designers and customers through its online retail platform.
As part of the deal, Louca joins Converted as Partner and Executive Director to lead strategic partnerships and regional expansion across Egypt and MENA.
The acquisition accelerates the launch of Converted Orders, a product that links digital advertising directly to verified sales and revenue data, allowing campaigns to optimise based on real transactions rather than clicks alone. The platform integrates advertising, payment processing, and order verification in a unified system.
The strategic rationale: most digital advertising still optimises for proxy metrics like impressions and clicks. Converted is building infrastructure that connects ad spend directly to verified purchase data, creating closed-loop attribution for merchants.
By integrating Mitcha’s designer network and customer base, Converted gains transaction data to train its AI models while expanding distribution for Egyptian creatives.
The move signals growing momentum in outcome-based advertising tech across emerging markets, where merchants demand clearer ROI visibility as customer acquisition costs rise.
Read more here.
🔦 Spotlight
The story behind investment powerhouse Shorooq
The story begins in 2015. Two friends and colleagues in Silicon Valley, Mahmoud Adi and Shane Shin, saw a fresh opportunity in the Middle East.
A year later, they moved to Abu Dhabi and co-founded Shorooq Partners, the first Emirati-founded seed and early-stage venture capital fund.
Mahmoud spent over 10 years at Mubadala Investment Company (Abu Dhabi’s $250B sovereign wealth fund) covering semiconductors, pharma, medtech, and metals. He also led the creation and setup of Hub71, Abu Dhabi’s global tech ecosystem. An engineer and entrepreneur at heart, Mahmoud co-founded Pure Harvest Smart Farms, one of the world’s most advanced controlled-environment agriculture companies.
Shane Shin worked at UBS, TD Securities, Lazard Frères, Alpine Investors, and GlobalFoundries (a Mubadala subsidiary). Originally from Korea, educated at Wharton (Summa Cum Laude, Joseph Wharton Scholar). Kauffman Fellows.
What started as a pure-play seed fund has evolved into a multi-asset platform:
- Venture capital (seed to growth)
- Private credit ($100M+ Nahda Fund II for MENA SMEs)
- Late-stage growth (new $200M Qatalyst Series backed by QIA for pre-IPO companies)
- AI innovation ($100M Presight-Shorooq Fund I with G42)
Shorooq now has 100+ portfolio companies with $500M+ revenue generated, 22,000 jobs created, and 5 exits to date. Marquee investments include:
- Pure Harvest Smart Farms (Mahmoud is co-founder)
- Tamara (Saudi BNPL leader)
- TruKKer (Middle East’s largest tech logistics platform)
- Sarwa (region’s first robo-advisor)
- NymCard (region’s first digital issuer processor)
- Lendo (Saudi’s leading P2P SME lending platform)
- Mozn (Saudi AI financial solutions)
- Breadfast (Egypt’s first native e-grocery platform)
- Qlub (ultra-fast dine-in payment via QR)
- Prypco (real estate freedom platform founded by Amira Sajwani)
From Mahmoud’s LinkedIn piece “From Silicon Valley to Abu Dhabi and Beyond”:
“Shorooq Partners has been keen on opening new offices in different regions primarily because we want to encounter untapped sourcing opportunities, help our founders kick off businesses successfully and expand physically beyond their origins to our core geographies where we have accumulated the right expertise and insights to share.”
Rooted in Abu Dhabi. Building an institution designed to endure. Born in a region where the future of capital is being written.
📰 Other News
UAE based Sharooq invests in AMI Labs
AMI Labs just raised $1.03 billion seed at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation with Shorooq participating .
Founded in 2026 by Turing Award winner Yann LeCun (former Meta Chief AI Scientist) and Alexandre Lebrun (ex-CEO Nabla), AMI Labs is building next-generation AI based on “world model” architectures.
The round was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, and Bezos Expeditions.
Participating investors included Shorooq, Temasek, Nvidia, SBVA, Mark Cuban, Eric Schmidt, and Xavier Niel.
Traditional AI systems predict text or images. AMI Labs is pioneering a fundamentally different approach: systems that learn from spatial and real-world data to reason, plan, and understand cause-and-effect in physical environments.
This architecture aims to enable AI agents with deeper reasoning capabilities beyond pattern prediction. Initial target sectors: manufacturing, aerospace, robotics, and biomedical industries.
Dr. Bilal Baloch (Partner, Shorooq): “AMI Labs represents one of the most ambitious efforts to redefine the foundations of artificial intelligence. Yann LeCun’s vision for world-model architectures could fundamentally expand what machines are capable of understanding and executing in the physical world.”
This marks one of the largest seed rounds ever raised by an AI startup.
Read more here.
That’s all for this week, thanks! All of our MENA based readers: please stay safe. Sam
First published 16 Mar 2026 on Substack
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