Happy Friday, friends 👋

We hope you enjoyed the Eid break!

Egypt’s endlessly fascinating — and oft-overlooked — semiconductor space steals the show this week, with InfiniLink securing a colossal $10M Seed round. Backed by Taiwanese chip giant MediaTek and Sukna Ventures, the startup is building next-gen optical chiplets to help AI data centres keep up with… well, AI.

In the UAE, Fuse – co-founded by George Davis, previously of stablecoin payments giant BVNK – has raised $6.6 million in seed funding led by Northzone (early backers of Spotify and Klarna). The startup is gunning to streamline cross-border payments across MENA through its virtual IBAN infrastructure. A notable roster of angels joined the round too, including Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga Agboola and ex-Morgan Stanley MENA president George Makhoul.

Elsewhere, Dubai continues to go full speed ahead on its robotaxi ambitions – onboarding Uber and WeRide just days after Apollo Go. Qatar Central Bank handed out its first BNPL license. And Musk’s Starlink has landed in Oman.

Enjoy the read! 👇

This week’s round-up is a 5 min read:

• 💾 Egypt’s InfiniLink raises $10M seed round to build next-gen optical connectivity chips for AI data centres

• 🌍 Fuse raises $6.6M to bring virtual IBANs to MENA, simplifying cross-border payments for global businesses

• 🚕 Dubai backs robotaxis: WeRide & Uber join RTA pilot after Apollo Go deal

• 🇶🇦 PayLater becomes first BNPL firm licensed by Qatar Central Bank

• 🤖 Stakpak raises $500K to scale AI-powered DevOps platform that slashes infra tasks from hours to minutes

🚀 Startup funding round-up

InfiniLink (🇪🇬 Egypt), a semiconductor startup specialising in advanced optical data connectivity chips for AI-powered data centres, has secured a $10M Seed round led by MediaTek (a Taiwanese fabless semiconductor company) and Saudi-based Sukna Ventures, with participation from Egypt Ventures and M Empire Angels.

Fuse (🇦🇪 UAE), a fintech building cross-border payments infrastructure to simplify money movement across MENA, has raised $6.6M in seed funding led by Northzone, with participation from Flourish Ventures, Alter Global, and angel investors including Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga Agboola and former Morgan Stanley MENA president George Makhoul.

Stakpak (🇪🇬 Egypt), an AI-powered DevOps IDE that helps teams build, maintain, and self-serve their software infrastructure – cutting infrastructure tasks from hours to minutes – has raised $500K in a pre-Seed round led by P1 Ventures, with participation from Digital Currency Group, 500 Sanabil, and Instabug founders Moataz Soliman and Omar Gabr.

Premium deep-dives

Check-out some of our recent deep-dives below:

• The UAE company building the iTunes for spare parts

• How Tabby (MENA’s most valuable fintech at $3.3B) bootstrapped customer acquisition

• Fetchr’s hypergrowth and unraveling: A candid reflection with Idriss Al Rifai

• The technical hurdles of building AI for Arabic dialects

• A look back at the origins of gaming in the Middle East

Funding

💾 Egypt’s InfiniLink raises $10M seed round to build next-gen optical connectivity chips for AI data centres

Egypt-based InfiniLink has raised $10 million in a seed round to develop next-gen optical connectivity chips for AI data centres.

The round was led by MediaTek – the Taiwanese semiconductor giant ($70BN market-cap) – alongside Sukna Ventures, with participation from Egypt Ventures and angel investors from the US, Europe, and MENA.

• InfiniLink was co-founded in 2022 by Ahmed F. Aboul-Ella (CEO) and Botros George (CTO), seasoned chip engineers who previously worked with multinational firms and helped establish MediaTek Egypt.

🔧 The wedge

AI might be the future – but all that compute needs to talk to each other. Fast.

InfiniLink’s founding insight was this: as AI models scale, data centres are choking on their own complexity. Traditional copper and pluggable optics can’t move data fast enough between processors.

To fix this, they’re building ultra-efficient, silicon photonics-based optical chiplets – dubbed iOTC – to deliver higher bandwidth and lower energy use in data centre interconnects.

🧠 Why it matters

AI workloads are exploding in size. Training and inference across clusters of GPUs and TPUs require communication that’s:

• Faster

• More power-efficient

• Scalable across rack-to-rack infrastructure

InfiniLink’s tech – based on co-packaged optics and chiplet architecture – sits at the heart of this future. Their integrated optical transceivers aim to leapfrog today’s power-hungry alternatives.

As AI data centres demand radical performance upgrades, InfiniLink is positioning itself as a key enabler of this next infrastructure wave.

🧬 What does the company do?

InfiniLink designs:

• iOTC optical chiplets for AI clusters and hyperscale data centres

• Co-packaged optical engines to replace legacy pluggables

• Low-power modules tailored for AI workloads

The company’s R&D is based in Cairo, and MediaTek has been a strategic partner since inception, offering technical and commercial support.

🔮 Outlook

The new funding will accelerate InfiniLink’s product roadmap, build out its engineering team, and bring its first commercial chiplets to market.

With MediaTek in its corner and demand for AI-ready data infrastructure surging, InfiniLink is well-positioned to become one of MENA’s first globally competitive semiconductor startups.

The InfiniLink deal offers a glimpse into a quiet renaissance underway in Egypt’s semiconductor industry. In 2023, Pearl Semiconductor raised $4.5 million in a round led by Sawari Ventures (Egypt) and Shorooq Partners (UAE), with participation from Qatar’s QBN Capital – another sign of rising regional conviction in the country’s deep-tech potential. To understand why this moment feels like a culmination, we need to look back at the long, winding journey from a handful of visionaries in the 1990s to today’s burgeoning ecosystem. More on that in an upcoming deep dive.

💸 Fintech

🇶🇦 PayLater has become the first company to receive a BNPL license from the Qatar Central Bank (QCB), marking the regulator’s official entry into the BNPL space and its support for Shari'a-compliant fintech solutions that promote financial inclusion. Founded in 2023 by Mohammed Al-Delaimi – also the founder and managing director of mobile payments platform SkipCash – PayLater offers short-term, interest-free instalment plans and has partnered with major institutions like Qatar Islamic Bank (QIB) and Starlink. The approval is part of QCB’s broader fintech strategy, which now includes 13 regulated companies across payments, neobanking, remittances, and financial infrastructure.

🤖 AI

🇺🇸 Cerebras Systems has cleared a US government review into its ties with UAE-based G42, paving the way for its anticipated IPO. The CFIUS probe – triggered by a voluntary disclosure of G42’s planned $335M investment (around 5% of Cerebras’ value) – had raised concerns due to G42’s deep ties to Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund Mubadala and its dominance as Cerebras’ largest client, accounting for 87% of earnings in H1 2024. The companies later argued the review was unnecessary, as G42 would only acquire non-voting shares. The clearance, comes shortly after UAE national security advisor Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed's Washington visit.

🇦🇪 CAMB.AI, a Dubai-founded startup offering AI-enabled voice translation and dubbing software to help content creators localise videos in multiple languages, has been selected for the inaugural Google for Startups Cloud AI Accelerator in North America. Fresh off an $11.5M pre-Series A round, the company joins a 15-startup cohort addressing real-world challenges with AI—from stroke detection to corporate finance automation. The equity-free program kicks off at Cloud Next 2025, providing 10 weeks of hands-on mentorship, technical support, and access to tools like Vertex AI and Gemini, culminating in a high-profile Demo Day in June.

🚗 Transport

🚕 Dubai is doubling down on robotaxis. Uber and WeRide have partnered with the Dubai Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) to pilot autonomous taxis on city streets – just days after the RTA signed a similar agreement with China’s Apollo Go.

This follows WeRide and Uber’s earlier rollout of driverless taxi services in Abu Dhabi, where they launched commercially in December 2024 after trials dating back to 2021. WeRide, the first company to receive a UAE national self-driving license, brings regional credibility and international scale, operating in 30+ cities globally.

Dubai’s shift to a multi-vendor strategy – following setbacks with GM’s Cruise – suggests a broader commitment to autonomous mobility. Apollo Go has committed to deploying 100 robotaxis in Dubai by end-2025 (scaling to 1,000 by 2028), while WeRide has yet to announce fleet numbers. The moves across both emirates support Dubai’s 2030 target to make 25% of city trips autonomous.

🛰️ Telcos

🇴🇲 Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite internet service, has been granted a Class 1 license by Oman’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) to begin retail and commercial operations across the country. The service, which offers speeds of up to 100 Mbps, will cover all regions – including remote and rugged terrain – boosting connectivity in underserved areas. Starlink’s entry is expected to intensify competition among telecom providers and enhance digital infrastructure for key sectors like oil and gas, mining, tourism, and agriculture. The move follows broader regional adoption, including Qatar Airways’ first in-flight Starlink connection in October 2024.

💰 VC React Podcast: Episode 30

🎧 This week on the VC React Podcast, we explore what it looks like when local founders tackle legacy systems head-on — from ClearGrid automating debt collection and enza rebuilding Africa’s financial rails, to CAMB.AI creating real-time AI dubbing engines that break language barriers at scale.