Weekly Market Highlights

29th of January 2026

This week’s news shows MENA’s growing role in shaping the future of AI and technology through innovation, funding, and global partnerships.

UAE-based AppliedAI closed a pre-Series B round led by Mubadala’s MENA Venture Capital Fund and Arbor Ventures to scale its AI-native workflow platform Opus globally, strengthening its position as an enterprise AI champion from Abu Dhabi for regulated industries such as banking, healthcare, insurance, and government.

Egypt-based NowPay is entering Saudi Arabia through NowAccess, a joint venture with Tas’heel backed by a $20M investment, to launch payroll-linked and employee financial wellness solutions, including on-demand salary access, tailored for the Saudi market.

Saudi-based Juthor raised $500K in a pre-seed round led by Flat6Labs to scale its cloud platform that helps retailers manage inventory, orders, and sales across multiple online marketplaces through real-time stock syncing and AI-driven insights.

UAE-based insurtech Mantas raised $1.77M in a Seed round to launch parametric insurance for cloud outages, combining automatic payouts with real-time risk monitoring to protect digital-first businesses from financial losses caused by cloud downtime, targeting MENA and North America.

Saudi-based Glamera acquired Kuwait’s salon SaaS platform Bookr to accelerate its GCC expansion in the beauty and wellness sector, strengthening its position as a unified, AI-powered lifestyle technology platform serving thousands of service providers and hundreds of thousands of users across the region.

UAE-based Yozo.ai raised $1.7M in pre-seed funding to build its AI-native growth engine that automates retention and conversion marketing for e-commerce merchants across channels like email, WhatsApp, and SMS, with plans to scale internationally beyond MENA.

Morocco-based Yakeey raised $15M in a Series A round, joined by Beltone Venture Capital alongside IFC, Enza Capital, and 212 Founders, to scale its end-to-end digital real estate platform and expand regionally, modernising property discovery, valuation, brokerage, and financing across Morocco and beyond.

Jordan-based Abwaab acquired Egypt’s Apex Education to expand its platform into end-to-end student support, combining tutoring and test preparation with personalised guidance for admission to top global universities.

Morocco-based Enakl raised $2.3M in a Seed round to scale its shared mobility solutions, launch its SaaS platform for operators and enterprises, and test new ridepooling fleet models, accelerating sustainable and collective transport across emerging markets.

UAE-based Property Finder raised $170M in new funding led by Mubadala, alongside another UAE sovereign wealth fund and BECO Capital, strengthening its position as the region’s leading real estate marketplace. The investment will support its ambition to become the Middle East’s real estate operating system, focused on transparency, trust, AI-driven products, and data-led decision making, bringing total equity raised to nearly $700M and making it one of the largest funding stories in MENA tech.

Nutri-tech company L-Nutra raised an additional $36.5M in its Series D round from Mubadala to accelerate the development of its science-backed nutrition programs focused on health and longevity.

Startup Grind Doha announced the winners of the 2025 Tech Startup Community Awards, celebrating founders, startups, investors, and ecosystem leaders driving innovation in Qatar. The community-led event highlighted the diversity and growing maturity of Qatar’s startup ecosystem across tech, AI, and fintech, with MBK Global joining as the title sponsor to support entrepreneurship and innovation.

qarah raised an angel round to scale its platform connecting customers with certified providers for water filtration and misting system sales and maintenance, with the funding supporting nationwide expansion, product development, service provider growth, and marketing.

Upscale AI raised $200M in a Series A round to scale its open AI networking platform that unifies GPUs, memory, storage, and networking using its custom SkyHammer chip. The funding will help expand teams and accelerate adoption among hyperscalers and infrastructure providers seeking high-performance, open alternatives to proprietary AI systems.

Neurophos Inc raised $110M to develop and commercialize its optical AI chip (OPU), which uses photons instead of electrons to deliver dramatically higher performance and energy efficiency. Backed by Bill Gates’ Frontier Fund, Microsoft, and Aramco Ventures, the company aims to challenge Nvidia’s dominance in AI chips with technology that could be up to 100x more powerful and efficient.

Notion has launched Arabic language support starting January 26, 2026, marking its first major product investment in the Middle East. The update makes Notion fully accessible in Arabic across its apps and website, reflecting strong user adoption in the region and reinforcing the company’s commitment to supporting founders, startups, and teams in Arabic-speaking markets.

Saudi fintech Vennre raised $9.6M in a Pre-Series A round to scale its platform that gives high-income individuals access to curated private market investments, including real estate, private equity, venture capital, and private credit, with Shariah-compliant options.

Saudi-based Declic raised $1M in a Seed round to scale its AI-powered social platform that connects people through event discovery, ticketing, and community building, with plans to expand from North Africa into the GCC.

Arabic.AI partnered with Stanford’s CRFM to build the first standardized benchmark for Arabic large language models using the HELM framework, ensuring Arabic AI is evaluated with the same rigor as global languages. The project strengthens transparency, research quality, and global recognition of Arabic AI models, marking a major step forward for the Arabic AI ecosystem.

The region is moving from adoption to leadership, building technologies with global impact and long-term value.