Happy Friday, friends 👋

As of mid-May, Egyptian startups have raised $124 million across at least six major deals, a 406% YoY surge and a staggering 8,000% MoM increase.

The question on everyone’s lips is: why now? We take a stab at outlining some of the contributing factors here. 

Elsewhere, not to be outdone by last week’s deluge of AI and data centre dealmaking in Riyadh, we found out yesterday that Stargate UAE is on the way: a 1 GW AI compute cluster set to launch in Abu Dhabi.

The news follows President Trump’s visit to the UAE last week, during which an agreement was signed to build the largest AI campus outside the US, a 5 GW facility, with Stargate UAE forming a part of it.

Stargate UAE is an extension of the $500B Stargate project announced in January by OpenAI, Microsoft, SoftBank and others. It falls under OpenAI’s new “OpenAI for Countries” initiative, which will aim to “expand global AI infrastructure in coordination with the US government.”

Interestingly, one of the backers of the US-based Stargate is UAE fund MGX, though from what we can see Microsoft was not listed as a partner in the UAE campus.

The 10-square-mile facility in Abu Dhabi will be powered by nuclear, solar, and natural gas to curb emissions, and for a glimpse of what the facility might look like in practice, highly recommend you check out this Bloomberg Original, where Emily Chang visits the Stargate site currently under construction in Abilene, Texas.

Without further ado, let’s dig into this week’s edition.

Recommend reading this one online so you don’t get cut off halfway through 👇

This week’s round-up is a 7 min read:

• 🇪🇬 Why are we suddenly seeing a surge in funding for Egyptian startups?

• 🤖 UAE-based Tarjama raises $15 million in Series A funding to scale Arabic AI for enterprise in MENA

• 🇶🇦 QIA-backed unicorn Builder.ai files for insolvency despite $450M in funding

• 🤝 G42 partners with OpenAI, Nvidia & Cisco to launch Stargate UAE, a 1GW AI megaproject

🚀 Startup funding round-up

Thndr (🇪🇬 Egypt), a digital investment platform enabling commission-free access to stocks, bonds, and mutual funds, has raised $15.7 million in a funding round led by Prosus, with participation from Y Combinator, BECO Capital, JIMCO, Endeavor Catalyst, Raba, and Onsi Sawiris.

Sylndr (🇪🇬 Egypt), a used-car marketplace integrating financing and vehicle services, has raised $15.7 million in a Series A round led by DPI via the Nclude Fund, with participation from Algebra Ventures, Nuwa Capital, Raed Ventures, and others.

Tarjama (🇦🇪 UAE), a language tech startup building Arabic-first AI solutions for enterprise use, has raised $15 million in a Series A round led by Global Ventures, with participation from Wamda Capital, TA Ventures, Phaze Capital, Golden Gate Ventures, and Endeavor Catalyst.

VUZ (🇸🇦 KSA), an immersive media platform offering XR, VR, AR, and AI-powered live content, has raised $12 million in a pre-Series C round from IFC (World Bank Group), Al Jazira Capital, Crosswork VC, and others.

ElGameya (🇪🇬 Egypt), a fintech digitising traditional savings circles (ROSCA), has raised a 7-figure USD round led by AYADY, with participation from Jedar Capital, Cubit Ventures, Venture Notes, and others.

Circle (🇰🇼 Kuwait), a q-commerce startup offering under-20-minute delivery of groceries via a tech-enabled dark store network, has raised $6 million in a Series A round from undisclosed investors.

SARsatX (🇸🇦 KSA), a spacetech company developing small satellites with SAR-based Earth Observation capabilities, has raised $2.6 million in a Seed round led by TONOMUS, with participation from Wa’ed Ventures, Access Bridge Ventures, and KAUST Innovation Ventures.

Ziadah (🇸🇦 KSA), an e-commerce SaaS platform that helps online stores increase conversions through smart, behaviour-driven marketing tools, has closed a Seed round from an undisclosed angel investor.

Green Desert Technologies (🇸🇦 KSA), a biotech company building sustainable solutions like algae cultivation to address food security, has received investment from Flat6Labs through its Startup Seed Fund.

THE WHITEGUARD (🇪🇬 Egypt), a cybersecurity and AI startup providing enterprise-grade digital protection, has raised a 6-figure USD pre-Seed round led by DEN VC.

Darwinz AI (🇪🇬 Egypt), an AI startup offering data intelligence tools for business forecasting and trend analysis, has secured an undisclosed investment from Flat6Labs as part of the Riyadh Seed Program.

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Funding

Why are we suddenly seeing a surge in funding for Egyptian startups?

Over the past two years, Egypt has faced a perfect storm of macro challenges: sharp currency devaluation, investor flight, and prolonged uncertainty. Naturally, this throttled capital deployment across the board, especially from regional VCs in the GCC, many of whom shifted into portfolio defence mode and paused new exposure entirely.

With local capital scarce, startups in Egypt had little choice but to do the hard thing: grow revenue, prove product-market fit, and build in dollar terms, without a whole pile of help. That discipline is finally being rewarded. What we’re seeing now in many respects is a lagged wave of funding flowing to companies that weathered the storm. Balance sheets are cleaner. Unit economics are clearer. Conviction is returning.

You can see it in the cap table makeups. DPI’s Nclude fund has appeared across multiple post-Series A rounds. Partech, based in Paris, has led two deals. This isn’t spray-and-pray capital, it’s very much a targeted return of institutional and international investors who were sitting out Egypt’s downturn and are now re-engaging.

There’s another shift, too: the best Egyptian startups are no longer building just for Egypt. Many are now positioning themselves as regional players. Proptech player Nawy is expanding into the GCC. Investing platform Thndr has secured a license in ADGM and is also eyeing Saudi. ROSCA platform Money Fellows is looking westward toward Morocco and the Maghreb.

What’s more, they’re in the “right” sectors. Fintech and proptech are two of the few verticals regional VCs are most bullish on, along with AI. But what makes these Egyptian players stand out in particular is that they’re solving deep, native problems, not just copying and pasting Western models.

• Money Fellows is digitising gameya-style informal savings.

• Nawy is tackling Egypt’s dysfunctional mortgage and housing finance market.

• Sylndr is fixing vehicle resale inefficiencies in a low-trust, high-friction environment.

All of this makes for a compelling combination: local resilience, sectoral momentum, and credible regional expansion. And, in short, that’s why capital is flowing again.

💸 Investments

🇮🇶 Abu Dhabi-based EQIQ is doubling its fund size from $15M to $30M to ramp up early-stage bets in Iraq’s digital economy, targeting e-commerce, logistics, and fintech. Founded by Mohamed Al-Hakim, ex-Careem Iraq/Jordan CEO and one of Iraq’s earliest fintech operators, and Said Rahmani, EQIQ blends VC capital with venture building. Of the $8.5M already deployed, three startups were co-built in-house. Recent startups backed include; Corrsy (edtech) and Wayl (fintech).

📈 Riyadh Valley Company, the investment arm of King Saud University, has invested in Middle East Venture Partners’ fourth fund (MEVF IV). MEVP, one of MENA’s largest VC firms with $300M+ in AUM, launched MEVF IV in 2023 with a $150M target anchored by the European Investment Bank. The fund focuses on fintech, SaaS, health-tech, logistics, marketplaces, and Web3, with a geographic scope across MENATP and a ticket range between $3M and $5M. To date, as part of MEVF IV, it’s backed startups including Stake, Zest Equity, and Keyper.

🏭 The Saudi Industrial Development Fund (SIDF) has partnered with Riyadh-based Sharia-compliant crowdfunding platform Lendo to launch a $53M financing program targeting industrial SMEs. The initiative will offer fast-track working capital solutions, like invoice and purchase order financing, via the Lendo platform.

🌍 International investments

🌐 US-based Network-as-a-Service startup Graphiant has secured a $19M Series B extension co-led by Aramco’s Wa’ed Ventures and stc Group’s Tali Ventures, as part of a broader $102M round that included Sequoia and others. Founded by Khalid Raza (also behind Viptela, acquired by Cisco), Graphiant enables secure, high-performance connectivity across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. As part of the deal, it will open a regional HQ in Riyadh, its first outside the US.

📦 Aramco Ventures has led a $36M round in US-based Arkestro, a startup using AI, behavioural science, and game theory to automate and optimise procurement. The platform claims to deliver nearly 19% savings per $1M spent and aims to shift procurement from a manual back-office task to a strategic lever. The round includes Altira Group and existing backers, and reflects Aramco’s growing interest in enterprise AI infrastructure with tangible cost outcomes.

📉 UAE-based VentureSouq has joined a $3.2M round for Tradoor, a decentralised trading platform on the TON network combining futures, options, and social trading. The round was led by TON Ventures and Kenetic Capital, with other backers including Sigil Fund, Protagonist, and Re7 Capital. Tradoor plans to roll out high-speed features like Turbo Mode (10,000 TPS), AI-powered trading, and social trading tools, with $1.5M of the round earmarked for token purchases to support its roadmap.

🤖 AI

🌌 Abu Dhabi-based G42 has partnered with OpenAI, Nvidia, Oracle, Cisco, and SoftBank to launch Stargate UAE, a 1-gigawatt AI compute cluster within the newly established 5GW UAE–US AI Campus. Backed by the UAE presidency and part of OpenAI’s “OpenAI for Countries” initiative, the project aims to accelerate sovereign AI development and provide local institutions with access to frontier models. Stargate UAE marks the latest in a string of major G42 deals this week, including partnerships with Mistral AI and World Wide Technology, as Abu Dhabi pushes to cement its position as a global AI hub.

🧠 Abu Dhabi’s TII has launched Falcon Arabic and Falcon-H1, expanding its Falcon LLM family. Falcon Arabic is its first Arabic-focused model, outperforming peers up to 4x its size. Falcon-H1 uses a hybrid Transformer–State Space Model architecture across six sizes (500M–34B), offering strong efficiency in math, coding, and multilingual tasks. Falcon-H1 is open-source; Falcon Arabic isn’t yet public.

🤝 New Entrants

🚚 Hong Kong-based on-demand delivery platform Lalamove has officially launched in the UAE, marking its 14th global market and first full deployment in the EMEA region. Founded in 2013, Lalamove offers real-time tracking, multi-stop orders, and a flexible vehicle fleet to serve SMEs. Lalamove's last significant publicly disclosed funding round took place in January 2021, during which it raised approximately $1.3 billion, leading to a valuation of $10 billion. The company has been preparing for a potential IPO.

🦺 Hong Kong-based viAct has raised $7.3 million in Series A funding led by Ireland’s VentureWave Capital, with backing from Singtel Innov8 and Korea Investment Partners, to accelerate its Middle East expansion, especially in Saudi Arabia. viAct offers AI-driven site monitoring that delivers real-time risk detection and predictive analytics for industries like construction, energy, and logistics.

🧠 US-based RIIG, founded by former U.S. Congressman Denver Riggleman, has secured a new funding round from UAE investors to support its rebranding to HOOTL and its pivot toward AI-driven health tech and insurance automation. The company also plans to open a UAE office. HOOTL aims to leverage its national security-grade AI systems to develop tools for insurance verification and claims adjudication.

🤝 Acquisitions

🛒 EFG Finance has sold its B2B marketplace Fatura to MaxAB-Wasoko, the pan-African retail and supply chain super app, becoming a major shareholder and securing a board seat. Founded in 2019 and acquired by EFG in 2022, Fatura brings 626 wholesalers across 16 cities to MaxAB’s network and is projected to drive 25% of Egypt revenue by year-end. The acquisition boosts MaxAB-Wasoko’s embedded finance offering, with credit now financing over 9% of sales in Egypt and Morocco. It follows the finalisation of Egypt-based MaxAB’s merger with Kenya’s Wasoko in August 2024, creating one of Africa’s largest e-commerce and fintech platforms.

🌍 SWFs

🧨 Once hailed as a billion-dollar AI unicorn, UK-based Builder.ai has filed for bankruptcy after investors seized $37M from its accounts, leaving just $5M in cash. CEO Manpreet Ratia, who replaced founder Sachin Dev Duggal in March, said the company had been operating with "zero dollars" in UK and US accounts and couldn’t recover from prior mismanagement. Backed by Microsoft, SoftBank, and the Qatar Investment Authority, Builder.ai had raised over $450M to make app creation “as easy as ordering a pizza,” but slashed revenue forecasts by 25% in late 2024 and was previously accused of passing off human-built code as AI. Duggal is now also named in an Indian money laundering probe.

📉 Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala recorded a $2.7B paper loss in Q1 2025 on its majority stake in GlobalFoundries, as the US chipmaker’s stock fell 14% to $16.6B, part of a broader tech sell-off triggered by uncertainty around President Trump’s tariff policy. GlobalFoundries, where Mubadala owns 81.5%, is its largest US equity holding by far. The sovereign fund’s US-listed portfolio dropped to $17.6B from $20.5B, despite new bets on companies like Bristol-Myers Squibb and Expedia. Mubadala also doubled down on Bitcoin, boosting its ETF exposure by 500K shares to 8.7M, even as BTC dipped 12% in Q1.

🚕 Mobility

🚘  Swvl has launched Swvl Luxury Travel, a premium mobility service offering airport transfers, intercity rides, event transport, and meet-and-greet services across its active markets. The new vertical targets rising demand from business travellers and HNW clients, backed by Swvl’s tech platform and partnerships with chauffeur providers, travel agencies, and a luxury fashion house. The launch follows a strong Q1 2025, with Swvl posting 12.4% YoY revenue growth (47% in constant currency), $0.8M in net profit, and record results in KSA.

🚖  WeRide has begun fully driverless robotaxi trials in Abu Dhabi, operating without safety drivers for the first time on Al Maryah and Al Reem Islands. The service builds on earlier trials across Yas and Saadiyat Islands and follows WeRide’s approval as the first company licensed to run autonomous vehicles on public roads in the UAE. The company also operates out of the SAVI cluster in Masdar City and is working toward commercial rollout later this year.

💰 VC React Podcast: Episode 35

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🎧 This week on the VC React Podcast, we unpack the flood of AI announcements coming out of Saudi, from the launch of HUMAIN and multi-billion-dollar chip deals with NVIDIA, to new AI focused venture funds from Wyld VC and STV.

📆 Events and Opportunities

🤖 Google has launched the second edition of its AI First accelerator for MENA and Turkiye-based startups, targeting Seed to Series A ventures developing AI-driven solutions. The 12-week, equity-free programme offers cloud credits, technical mentorship, and go-to-market support, alongside access to Google’s AI/ML infrastructure and investor networks. Applications are open until June 16, 2025. Apply here.

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