Founding MENA #11
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
- 🇦🇪 Utexo raised $7.5M in seed led by Tether. See more here.
- 🇦🇪 Kudwa raised $1.1M in funding backed by 1818 Venture Capital. See more here.
- 🇸🇦 Resemble AI raised undisclosed amount from Wa’ed Ventures. See more here.
- 🇸🇾 Miftah raised undisclosed amount in pre-seed. See more here.
📰 Startup News
Qualiphi Acquires Career Club
Qualiphi, an AI-powered career services platform founded in 2025 by Nevien Magdy, just acquired Career Club from iCareer.
Career Club was one of the region’s first virtual career centers, built to bridge education and employment through digital skills development, career pathway exploration, and employer connections. Over the years, it ran employability programs with the ILO, UK Aid, and GIZ.
Qualiphi is building the first Arab-focused Career Services Management platform, a unified digital ecosystem connecting universities, employers, and students for career development and job placement.
The platform already serves as the official career enablement partner for Egypt’s Ministry of Higher Education, Ain Shams University, Arab Academy for Science and Technology, and Universities of Canada. In 2025, Qualiphi supported 500,000+ students in Egypt alone.
Regional expansion is underway. Qualiphi has partnered with three GCC universities, supporting 7,000+ students from ten nationalities. By 2026, the company plans to add 15 new Egyptian universities and expand deeper into the Gulf.
The thesis: North Africa and MENA still rely on international career platforms built outside the region. Qualiphi identified this as a structural gap and is building localised infrastructure purpose-built for Arab youth entering fragmented labor markets.
The acquisition brings Career Club’s legacy programs, employer network, and institutional relationships into Qualiphi’s AI-powered ecosystem.
The combined platform now offers career guidance, skills development, CV optimisation, digital career fairs, and employer matching, all integrated into university workflows.
Most regional universities still manage career services manually or through outdated systems. Qualiphi is automating the entire stack and scaling this with the largest educational institutions across MENA.
Read more here.
Yassir Acquires Kawarizmi
Yassir, Algeria’s homegrown super app, just bought Kawarizmi, a Paris-based programmatic adtech company. The deal signals Yassir’s next expansion vector: retail media and advertising infrastructure.
Founded in 2017 by Noureddine Tayebi and El Mahdi Yettou, Yassir operates across 60+ cities in six countries: Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, France, and Canada. The platform serves 8 million+ users across ride-hailing, delivery, and fintech.
Kawarizmi brings expertise in algorithmic media buying, creative optimisation, and cross-market programmatic execution across Europe, Africa, MENA, South Asia, and diaspora audiences.
Super apps generate massive behavioural data, ride patterns, delivery preferences, payment histories, location data. Most monetise through take rates on transactions. The smarter play is building a retail media network that lets brands advertise directly to high-intent consumers already using the platform.
Amazon pioneered this. Grab and Gojek replicated it in Southeast Asia. Yassir is importing the model to North Africa.
Kawarizmi will operate as a standalone programmatic entity within Yassir, handling media buying both on-platform and across external channels, open web, connected TV, and mobile. The integration lets Yassir monetise inventory it already controls while building a scalable ad network that extends beyond its own ecosystem.
For brands, this creates a direct path to North African and francophone African consumers through data-driven targeting and performance measurement, markets that remain underserved by global ad platforms.
Yassir raised $150M in Series B (2022) led by Bond, with participation from DN Capital, Dorsal Capital, and Quiet Capital. The company has long positioned itself as the regional everything app. Adding programmatic advertising turns user engagement into a compounding revenue stream independent of transaction volume.
The timing matters. Meta and Google dominate digital advertising globally, but localised platforms with first-party data and regional distribution can carve out defensible positions in emerging markets.
Yassir is building that infrastructure before international competitors lock down the space.
Read more here.
📰 Other News
Starlink Officially Launches in the UAE
SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service is now live in the UAE, bringing space-based connectivity to a market dominated by Etisalat and du’s fibre networks.
Starlink operates differently than traditional ISPs. Instead of fiber cables or cell towers, the service routes internet through a constellation of low-Earth orbit satellites. This means connectivity anywhere with a clear view of the sky, no ground infrastructure required.
The UAE already has world-class fibre coverage in urban centres. Dubai and Abu Dhabi residents won’t ditch Etisalat for Starlink. Fibre is faster, more reliable, and cheaper for fixed residential use.
But Starlink isn’t competing with urban fiber. It’s targeting use cases where fibre doesn’t reach or isn’t practical.
Remote desert locations. Offshore oil rigs. Construction sites. Temporary event setups. Backup connectivity for businesses that can’t afford downtime. Mobile setups for film crews, researchers, or expeditions.
Performance won’t match fibre in cities, but that’s not the point. Starlink’s value is flexibility and coverage. It works in places where laying cable isn’t economically viable or physically possible.
The UAE is investing heavily in digital infrastructure. Government entities are pushing connectivity into previously underserved areas. Starlink adds another layer to that strategy without requiring new ground infrastructure.
For startups and businesses operating in remote areas (renewable energy projects, mining operations, agricultural tech pilots) reliable internet access has been a persistent constraint. Starlink removes that bottleneck.
The service also provides disaster recovery redundancy. If regional fibre goes down (like the AWS outage earlier this month), satellite-based backup keeps critical operations online.
Starlink’s entry doesn’t disrupt the UAE’s telecom incumbents in urban markets. But it does fill connectivity gaps that fibre and mobile networks haven’t economically justified addressing. That’s the wedge: being the only viable option where traditional infrastructure isn’t.
Read more here.
That’s all for this week, thanks! All of our MENA based readers: please stay safe. Sam
First published 23 Mar 2026 on Substack
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