mena
(35)
Chalhoub Greenhouse Gives Startups a Way Into the Store
The luxury retailer’s venture builder pairs founders with grants, working retail channels and people who can say yes. Its real test comes when the pilot ends.
YTG takes green ideas from the classroom to the factory floor
The Cairo consultancy grew out of youth environmental education. Today, its work connects startup coaching, industrial efficiency and the awkward business of making sustainability pay.
Parachute16 knows the jump. Now it builds the landing.
After eight earlier ventures, Ghassan Halawa built a company to help other founders. From Palestinian startups entering Saudi Arabia to PepsiCo’s youth hackathons, Parachute16 makes a business of getting people ready for their next move.
VentureFriends puts a price on staying close
The European seed investor helped keep Blueground financed when outside money proved elusive. That history gives its promise of founder support a useful test: what happens when the next round does not arrive?
Dubai’s AED1 Billion Bet on the Investors Behind the Startups
Dubai Future District Fund backs technology companies and the venture funds that finance them. Its next test is turning patient capital into customers, specialist expertise and businesses that can grow beyond Dubai.
STV wants founders to keep more of what they build
The Riyadh investor built its name backing regional tech companies. Now, callable equity and a Google-backed AI fund are widening its answer to a stubborn question: how should a startup pay for growth?
Floward’s $190 million bet: the bouquet is only the beginning
The Kuwait-born company built its flower business around controlling the delivery. Now perfumes, robotic vending machines and prepaid gift cards are widening its ambitions - and the job of keeping its promises.
Shahid Butt Has Spent a Career Making Television Behave More Like the Internet
From bargain broadband to live TV on a laptop and addressable ads on offline set-top boxes, Shahid Butt's career follows one persistent idea: make complicated media technology useful to ordinary people.
palm.hr
palm.hr is a Riyadh-born, cloud-based HR and payroll platform built for small and mid-sized businesses across Saudi Arabia and the wider GCC. It brings employee data, time and attendance, WPS-compliant payroll, and employee engagement into one system that plugs directly into local government rails like GOSI and Mudad, so companies can run people operations that comply with regional labor law out of the box. Founded in 2019, it raised a $5M pre-Series A in 2023 to expand across MENA and pairs its software with an outsourced HR concierge service.
Ampverse
Ampverse is a Singapore-founded, creator-first gaming and entertainment company that connects consumer brands and game publishers with gaming audiences across Southeast Asia, India and the Gulf. It owns and operates gaming media properties, esports teams and creator networks, and packages them into marketing, in-game advertising, publishing and analytics services for brands like Coca-Cola, KFC and Red Bull. The group reaches a claimed 600M+ fans through its owned assets and managed creators.
Cozmo AI
Cozmo AI (formerly CozmoX AI) builds multimodal 'AI employees' that answer calls, read documents, and complete regulated business processes end to end for financial services, insurance, and enterprise operations. Founded by Alok Kumar and Nuha Hashem - the team behind the Gen Z neobank Zywa - the Y Combinator W22 company runs from San Francisco and Dubai, and says its agents handle voice conversations in 70+ languages including multiple Arabic dialects.
Flow48
Flow48 is a Dubai-based fintech that gives small and medium businesses in emerging markets fast access to working capital by turning their future revenue and unpaid invoices into upfront cash. Founded in 2022 by serial entrepreneur Idriss Al Rifai, the company uses a proprietary, data-driven underwriting engine to approve non-dilutive, collateral-free financing of up to $20 million, typically disbursing funds within 24 to 48 hours. Operating across the UAE and South Africa with expansion into Saudi Arabia, Flow48 raised a $69 million Series A in February 2025 to close the SME funding gap that traditional banks leave open.
Lucidya | لوسيديا
Lucidya is a Riyadh-based, AI-native customer experience management (CXM) platform built for Arabic-speaking markets. Using a proprietary Arabic NLP engine that understands 15+ dialects with roughly 92% sentiment accuracy, it unifies social listening, media monitoring, surveys, customer profiles and omnichannel support into a single system, and now deploys autonomous AI agents for customer-facing roles. Founded in 2016 by Abdullah Asiri and co-founders, the company serves enterprises and governments across the MENA region and in 2025 raised a $30M Series B, one of the largest AI funding rounds in Saudi Arabia.
Mawaad Environmental Services
Mawaad Environmental Services (MES) is a Dubai-based materials processing and resource-recovery company founded in 2018 by Ismail Fahmy. It turns industrial by-products - chiefly the slag left over from steelmaking - into marketable construction materials such as steel slag aggregates and ladle furnace slag. Operating on a cradle-to-cradle circular-economy model across the GCC and Egypt, MES holds long-term processing agreements with steel producers including Emirates Steel and Ezz Steel, and reported processing and selling 300,000 tons of steel slag in the first half of 2021.
Mozn
Mozn is a Riyadh-based enterprise AI company founded in 2017 that builds AI for high-stakes decisions in the Arabic-speaking world. Its flagship platform, FOCAL, unifies fraud prevention and anti-money-laundering (AML) compliance for banks, fintechs and governments, while its OSOS platform delivers Arabic natural-language understanding and enterprise knowledge intelligence. Backed by a $10M Series A, Mozn has served more than 100 organizations and, in 2025, became one of only ten vendors worldwide named a Category Leader by Chartis Research in both AML transaction monitoring and KYC solutions.
penny.
penny. is a Saudi-based B2B SaaS company that digitizes the full source-to-pay procurement cycle on one cloud platform. It combines e-sourcing, RFQs, purchase orders, supplier management, spend analytics and AI-driven automation so enterprises can cut costs, tighten governance and speed up buying. The modular, customizable system is used by companies across 75+ countries and is layered with AI tools like the Bidly.ai sourcing assistant to make procurement faster and more transparent.
Podeo
Podeo is a Dubai-based podcast platform that gives creators an end-to-end toolkit to record, host, produce, distribute and monetize their shows. Started in Beirut and now the largest podcast platform in the Middle East and North Africa, it has onboarded more than 100,000 creators reaching an audience of roughly 50 million listeners. Its distinguishing move is distribution beyond the usual apps - pushing audio into radio stations, airlines, ride-hailing, gaming and chat apps - paired with a programmatic advertising model that keeps the service free for creators while sharing revenue as their audiences grow.
PropSpace and the expensive business of forgetting to call back
A Dubai CRM built around the unglamorous details of property work has outlasted an acquisition and emerged independent. Its bet: the next deal may already be sitting in the database.
RemotePass
RemotePass is a global employment and payroll platform that helps companies onboard, manage, and pay distributed teams across more than 150 countries. It combines Employer of Record (EOR) services, contractor management, and compliance with an embedded fintech layer that gives workers USD accounts, global cards, and health insurance. Founded in the UAE in 2021 and dual-headquartered in Boston and Abu Dhabi, the company has facilitated over $800 million in cross-border payroll for more than 35,000 workers.
Stake
Stake is a Dubai-based digital real estate investment platform that lets people buy fractions of income-generating property from as little as AED 500. Investors earn passive rental income and capital appreciation while Stake handles sourcing, acquisition, management and exit. Regulated by the DFSA in the UAE and the CMA in Saudi Arabia, the platform serves more than two million users across 181 countries and has expanded from Dubai into Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and US industrial real estate.
WegoPro
WegoPro is a business travel and expense management platform that gives growing companies a single place to book flights and hotels, enforce travel policies through multi-level approvals, and automate expense reporting with real-time analytics. Formerly the Singapore-founded SaaS startup Travelstop, it was acquired by Middle East travel marketplace Wego in September 2023 and relaunched as WegoPro in January 2024, initially across seven MENA markets. The platform pairs consumer-grade booking experience with finance-team controls, aiming to reduce travel costs and administrative overhead for small and mid-sized businesses.
Zbooni
Zbooni is a Dubai-based conversational commerce platform that lets businesses capture orders, send invoices, and accept payments directly inside messaging and social apps like WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger. Founded in 2016 by Ramy Assaf and Ashraf Atia, the company champions what it calls cCommerce - selling through the chat window customers already use - and provides merchants a mobile business dashboard, payment links, and its own payment gateway across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt.
ZenHR
ZenHR is a cloud-based Human Resources Management System (HRMS) built specifically for the Middle East, North Africa and Gulf region. It automates payroll, attendance, onboarding, performance and recruitment while staying compliant with local labor laws, social insurance (GOSI), and wage protection (WPS) rules. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Riyadh, ZenHR serves companies from small businesses to large enterprises across markets including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and Iraq.
COLABS
COLABS is a flexible workspace and community platform that provides fully serviced offices, coworking space, and back-office support for startups, scaling companies, and enterprise teams. Founded in Pakistan in 2019 by twin brothers Omar and Ali Shah, it operates more than 500,000 square feet across 10+ locations serving over 5,000 members, and in April 2026 opened a 4,000-square-meter flagship campus in the Al-Narjis district of northern Riyadh to anchor its expansion into Saudi Arabia.
Ray Dargham
Ray Dargham is the co-founder and CEO of Step, the Dubai-born media and events company behind the Step Conference, a startup and tech festival that grew from about 100 people in a co-working space in 2012 into an 8,000-plus attendee gathering that now travels between Dubai, Riyadh and San Francisco. He also runs the digital publishers StepFeed and YallaFeed, founded the brand-tech shop Spiderfrogs, and hosts the Maté podcast for MENA founders. Forbes put him on its 30 Under 30 cover in 2018.
Khalid Kabeer
Khalid Kabeer is a fintech and financial-inclusion executive with more than two decades of leadership in microfinance and MSME lending across Pakistan, the Middle East, Europe and Africa. A Fellow Chartered Accountant who started in audit and textiles, he helped build Kashf Microfinance Bank as its first CFO, ran global operations and then led Vitas Group as CEO, steering it toward a data-centric, digital-first lending model and founding its early-stage fintech investment arm, Vitas Ventures. He is now Chief Product Officer at AdalFi, a Lahore-based credit-scoring and lending-technology company taking instant, pre-approved digital credit to scale.
Aumet
Aumet is a Saudi-headquartered healthtech building an AI-first procurement operating system for pharmacies, hospitals and pharmaceutical suppliers across the Middle East. The platform connects more than 12,000 pharmacies with 1,000+ suppliers and processes roughly $1B in annual gross merchandise value.
Mohamed Batterjee
Dr. Mohamed Mazen Batterjee is the Co-Founder, CCO, and investor behind Aumet, an AI-first procurement operating system reshaping pharmaceutical supply chains across the Middle East. A scion of one of Saudi Arabia's oldest pharma dynasties, he parlayed a DBA from IE Business School and 15+ years running Batterjee Pharmaceuticals into co-founding a platform that now connects 12,000+ pharmacies, 1,000+ suppliers, and has processed over $1 billion in GMV. Aumet closed a $12M Series A in May 2026, bringing total funding to $21.84M.
Shahed Jaber
Shahed Jaber is the Co-Founder of Aumet Inc, MENA's largest B2B healthcare procurement marketplace. Based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, he previously founded UniOrders - a B2B healthcare marketplace acquired by Aumet in 2020. With a pharmacy background from the University of Jordan, Jaber has helped grow Aumet into an AI-first procurement platform serving 12,000+ pharmacies and 32 hospitals across the MENA region, processing over $1 billion in GMV and raising $21.84M in total funding.
Yahya Aqel
Yahya Aqel is the co-founder and CEO of Aumet, MENA's largest B2B healthcare marketplace and AI-first procurement operating system. A biomedical engineer turned serial entrepreneur, he has founded five health tech startups across Silicon Valley, the Middle East, and Western Europe — two of which resulted in successful exits. Aumet, backed by Emkan Capital and others, has raised $21.84M to date and processes over $1 billion in gross merchandise volume annually, connecting 12,000+ pharmacies with 1,000+ pharmaceutical suppliers across Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.