Happy Friday, friends 👋

A quiet week on the funding front – but no shortage of stories to grapple with.

Yesterday evening, Calo, the Bahrain-born, Saudi-HQ’d personalised ready-to-eat meal platform, announced its UK launch via the acquisition of Fresh Fitness Food and Detox Kitchen, giving it instant localisation and infrastructure tuned to the UK’s health-focused consumer.

Meanwhile, Fluent Ventures unveiled a $40M fund to pursue what it calls geographic alpha – the belief that the most successful startups in emerging markets aren’t invented from scratch, but rebuilt from proven Western models adapted to local conditions. The fund is led by Alexander Lazarow and will deploy across multiple emerging markets.

In the Gulf’s cloud kitchen chessboard, QIA’s $25M investment in Rebel Foods at a £1.4B valuation may be read as a counterweight to Kitopi, which is backed by SoftBank, with KSA’s PIF and Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala as LPs.

And finally, Revolut reported stellar 2024 earnings, with profits more than doubling to £1B, driven by growth in crypto and wealth. A UAE launch remains imminent.

Enjoy this week's edition 👇

This week’s round-up is a 5 min read:

• 🥗 Calo absorbs Fresh Fitness Food and Detox Kitchen in UK launch

• 🌍 Fluent Ventures announces $40M fund to back emerging market founders rebuilding proven models for local markets

• 🍔 Rebel Foods raises $25M from QIA at $1.4B valuation, eyes IPO and expansion across MENA

• 🪨 Oman’s 44.01 and Aircapture win $1M XPRIZE for turning CO₂ into rock beneath Fujairah

• 📈 Revolut doubles profits in 2024 to £1B, fueled by crypto and wealth boom

🚀 Startup funding round-up

Resolv Labs (🇦🇪 UAE), a crypto startup providing a delta-neutral yield-bearing stablecoin protocol, has raised $10 million in Seed funding led by Cyber.Fund and Maven11, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, SCB Limited, Arrington Capital, Animoca Ventures, Gumi Cryptos, NoLimit Holdings, and Robot Ventures.

Premium deep-dive

Rewiring B2B finance in Pakistan and beyond ↗

What it means to build in a market where volatility isn’t a risk – it’s a cyclical certainty, why going top-down beats direct-to-MSME, and how you build real moats in enterprise fintech — not with UX, but with trust, switching friction, and time.

Acquisition

🥗 Calo absorbs Fresh Fitness Food and Detox Kitchen in UK launch

Saudi-HQ’d personalised meal platform Calo has launched in the UK and acquired Fresh Fitness Food and Detox Kitchen, two of London’s most established meal delivery brands. The move marks Calo’s first expansion beyond the Gulf and sets the stage for broader European growth.

The UK was a “logical next step,” according to Calo UK GM Caspar Rose, due to timezone alignment, shared language, and a cultural fit with the brand’s health-focused ethos.

💡 Strategic rationale

The acquisitions allow Calo to instantly localise its offering and inherit an infrastructure tailored to the UK’s health-conscious consumer. Fresh Fitness Food and Detox Kitchen served niche audiences with chef-made, nutritionally personalised meals — values that map neatly onto Calo’s product and mission.

Rather than run them separately, both brands are being seamlessly folded into Calo’s core platform. Customers will be transitioned to near-identical plans under the Calo name.

💰 Backing the play

The UK expansion follows Calo’s $25M Series B round in December, led by Nuwa Capital with participation from Khwarizmi Ventures, STV, and regional family offices. The round has since been upsized to $50M, with the second close expected in Q1 2025.

Calo is currently valued at $250M, has surpassed $100M in annualised revenue, and is nearing profitability ahead of a planned Saudi IPO by 2027.

🍽️ How it works

Founded in Bahrain in 2019 by Ahmed Al Rawi and later joined by co-founder Moayed Almoayed, Calo delivers personalised ready-to-eat meals — including breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks — using a centralised kitchen model with same-day delivery via its own fleet.

In the UK, it will use DPD for national orders and a local fleet for London-based customers.

Plans start at £11 per day, with options spanning high-protein, low-carb, vegetarian, and wellness-focused regimens. The platform currently offers over 35 meals per day, dynamically tailored to individual needs.

🌍 What’s next

Following its UK debut, Calo is eyeing wider European expansion and new customer segments — including meal plans for muscle gain, chronic conditions like diabetes and PCOS, and longevity-focused nutrition.

💸 VC

🌍 Fluent Ventures has closed a $40M fund to pursue what it calls “geographic alpha” — the belief that the most successful startups in emerging markets aren’t inventing from scratch, but rebuilding proven Western models to suit local realities. Led by Alexandre Lazarow, the San Francisco-based firm is active across MENA, Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. In MENA, it has backed Saudi-based BRKZ, a construction tech startup. With a strategy echoing that of firms like Class 5 Global, Fluent is similarly emphasising deep founder-market alignment and local product-market fit. Lazarow’s prior portfolio includes Chime and ZenBusiness, with an estimated $30B+ in enterprise value created.

🌱 Tunisian asset manager UGFS-VC has announced the first close of its early-stage tech fund, New Era Fund I, locking in €7M of its €15M target. The close includes a €3.5M anchor commitment from ANAVA, Tunisia’s public-private fund of funds backed by the World Bank, KfW, and CDC. The fund will back Series A startups in AI, biotech, and green tech—sectors UGFS-VC believes are critical to Tunisia’s innovation economy. With over 100 startup investments under its belt, UGFS-VC sees this as a market-shaping moment, while ANAVA continues its push to strengthen Tunisia’s venture ecosystem, having now committed €45M across 10 funds.

🌿 Abu Dhabi’s startAD and MENA-based VC firm VentureSouq have launched the third edition of the Conscious Investor Fellowship (CIF 3.0), uniting 25 senior capital allocators across MENA for an intensive eight-week program aimed at reshaping climatetech funding. Backed by the Environment Agency – Abu Dhabi, the fellowship blends technical deep dives, peer learning, and deal syndication to help family offices, sovereign funds, and corporate arms fund climate solutions aligned with local needs. Amid a regional mismatch—$3.6B deployed globally by MENA investors vs. <0.2% captured locally—CIF 3.0 is pushing capital homeward, reframing what it means to invest in climate: sector-specific, commercially viable, and grounded in MENA realities.

🌔 Tambi Jalouqa, former co-founder of Propeller VC and POSRocket, has launched fundraising for his new fund, Maza Ventures. Focused on seed-stage software startups in MENA, Jalouqa will continue angel investing until the fund's first close, after which Maza will begin deploying larger checks. With 11 angel investments already made, Jalouqa aims to support early-stage founders in the region.

🌎 International investments

🍔 Rebel Foods, the full-stack foodtech company behind a sprawling network of 450+ cloud kitchens and owned outlets across India, MENA, the UK, and Indonesia, has secured a fresh $25M investment from Qatar Investment Authority at a $1.4B valuation. Co-founded by Jaydeep Barman, Rebel is pushing further into physical restaurants and food courts, as it eyes a public listing in 2025-26. The company’s 15-minute delivery app QuickiES launched earlier this year, and FY24 revenues hit Rs 1,420 crore—up from Rs 1,195 crore in FY23. This latest capital injection sharpens the regional rivalry with Kitopi, Rebel’s Gulf-based counterpart backed by SoftBank, PIF, and Mubadala.

💰 Earnings

📺 Starzplay, the Abu Dhabi-based streaming platform majority-owned by ADIO and e&, crossed $100 million in annual revenue for the first time in 2024—2.5x its earnings since the $420M acquisition in 2022. Now operating from Yas Creative Hub with 40+ staff, the platform credits its growth to AI-powered content discovery and a push into local originals like Kaboos and Million Dollar Listing UAE. With IPO plans underway, Starzplay is positioning itself as a core pillar of Abu Dhabi’s media economy while doubling down on content, sports rights, and AI-enhanced viewer experiences.

📈 Revolut more than doubled its profits in 2024, hitting £1bn in pre-tax earnings on £3.1bn in revenue—driven by a surge in crypto trading and 15 million new users, bringing its global base to over 50 million. Its wealth division alone brought in £506mn, nearly 4x its 2023 total. Now operating under a UK banking licence, Revolut is expanding globally and preparing to launch in Dubai, where fintech veteran Ambareen Musa has been appointed UAE CEO. The company is actively hiring and pursuing local regulatory approval as it eyes deeper regional growth and a broader push toward 100 million daily active users worldwide.

⌨️ Climatetech

🪨 Project Hajar, the carbon removal initiative by Omani startup 44.01 and U.S.-based Aircapture, has been awarded a $1 million XPRIZE X-Factor award for its breakthrough work in permanent CO₂ sequestration in Fujairah, UAE. Using Direct Air Capture to extract CO₂ from the atmosphere, 44.01 then mineralises it into peridotite rock—ensuring the carbon can never escape. Backed by ADNOC and the Fujairah Natural Resources Corporation, the project has already converted 10 tonnes of CO₂ and is now scaling up to 300 tonnes in its first phase. The award comes on the heels of 44.01’s $42 million Series A last year, led by Equinor Ventures and Shorooq Partners, with participation from Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, Air Liquide VC, Siemens, and Breakthrough Energy Ventures.

💰 Fintech

🌐 PayPal has opened its first-ever Middle East and Africa hub in Dubai Internet City, cementing a strategic foothold in the region’s digital economy. Led by Suzan Kereere, President of Global Markets, the move brings PayPal’s cross-border commerce tools, smart wallets, and next-gen payment tech closer to MENA businesses. The hub will support both large enterprises and SMEs, building on existing partnerships across aviation, tourism, digital goods, and retail.

📱 Dubai-based Ziina زينة has launched Tap to Pay on iPhone in the UAE, enabling businesses to accept in-person, contactless payments using just an iPhone—no terminals, no extra hardware required. The launch follows a $22 million Series A round in September 2024, led by Altos Ventures with backing from Fintech Collective, Avenir Growth, Activant Capital, Y Combinator, FJ Labs, MEVP, Jabbar Internet Group, and JIMCO.

🔓 American Express Saudi Arabia has rolled out an open banking-powered credit experience in partnership with Tarabut, targeting underserved segments like the self-employed and non-salaried. Enabled by Saudi’s progressive regulatory framework, the feature allows customers to request credit limit increases directly through the Amex app—securely and without paperwork.

🕌 Ruya, the UAE’s digital-first Islamic bank, now lets users buy and sell cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin directly through its app—making it the first Islamic bank globally to offer this. Powered by Fuze’s infrastructure, the service is positioned as Shari’ah-compliant and designed for long-term investing, not speculation. It comes as crypto adoption surges in the UAE, with $30B in inflows over the past year.

⌨️ Tech

💾 Du and Microsoft are building a AED2 billion ($544M) hyperscale data centre in Dubai to expand Microsoft’s regional cloud infrastructure and address the UAE’s growing AI-driven data needs. As the country faces a capacity crunch, the project positions Microsoft as the anchor tenant and du as developer

📆 Events and Opportunities

🇿🇦 Google for Startups has opened applications for its 2025 Africa Accelerator, targeting Seed to Series A startups building impactful tech across the continent. The 10-week equity-free program offers mentorship, product support, and connections to Google’s global network. More info →

🇵🇸 Join Tech for Palestine on April 28 at 6:00pm CET for a 60-min webinar on Palestine’s tech ecosystem with speakers like Ambar Amleh (Ibtikar Fund), Majd Khalifeh (Flow Accelerator), and Ahmed Alsaidi (Sellenvo). Register here.

📚 What we’re reading

• a16z acqui-hires VC tech podcaster Erik Torenberg, who joins as new partner (TechCrunch)

• Secretive VC firm Hedosophia raises over $200m for secondaries fund, sources say (Sifted)

• The monthly template Better uses as a seed stage D2C company (Walid Daniel Dib)

• Black Forest Labs: Europe’s most-hyped — and elusive — startup? (Sifted)