mena-startups
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RAED Ventures bets on the boring bits
Rent payments. Expense reports. Contracts. RAED Ventures backs the machinery of everyday business - and its founder-support programme offers a revealing clue to how it thinks.
Falak built a startup fund with rooms, rituals and a runway
The Riyadh firm does not merely write cheques. It surrounds founders with investors, accelerators, market-entry help and a place to sit - then asks the whole system to move faster.
DXwand
DXwand is a Dubai- and Cairo-based enterprise AI company whose ORXTRA platform lets large organisations build and deploy generative AI agents on top of their own documents, databases and workflows. Founded in 2018 by two former Microsoft executives, Ahmed Mahmoud and Mahmoud Gomaa, the company built its edge on two hard problems most Western vendors skipped: understanding spoken Arabic across its many dialects, and running useful AI cheaply enough that a bank or a ministry can afford to put it in front of millions of people. Its knowledge-mining and RAG engine removes the manual data-labelling step that normally stalls enterprise AI projects, and its agents ship as pre-built modules for customer service, procurement and HR, or as custom builds through a no-code Agent Builder that supports 20+ language models and 80+ data sources. DXwand serves financial services, government, healthcare, telecom, education, media and retail clients across MENA, has raised roughly $6.9 million to date including a $4 million Series A led by Shorooq Partners and Algebra Ventures, and says it reached about $5 million in annual recurring revenue while remaining profitable.
Rewaa
Rewaa is a Riyadh-based retail technology company that builds a cloud-based operating platform for small and medium retailers, unifying point-of-sale, inventory management, accounting and ZATCA-compliant e-invoicing in a single dashboard. Founded in 2018, it synchronizes physical stores and online sales channels in real time and has grown to serve more than 23,000 active merchants across Saudi Arabia and the wider region. Rewaa raised the largest Series A for a SaaS company in MENA ($27M in 2023) and followed with a $45M Series B in late 2025 to expand its AI-driven automation tools.