Happy Friday! There’s no shortage of startups that have received funding this week, so we’ll keep this short and sweet, and let you get up to speed.

P.S. We apologise for the lack of deep-dive this week! Rest assured, normal service will resume from next week on, where we’ll be taking a look at startups tackling the food waste crisis across the Middle-East.

This week’s round-up is a 5 min read:

• 💰 Egyptian fintech Lucky One raises $3 million round to expand its discounts and credit platform

• 💸 Oraseya Capital invests in seven startups through the SANDBOX accelerator

• 🤖 Nama Ventures’ backed Brev.dev acquired by NVIDIA

• 🔈 Catch-up on Episode 6 of the VC React Podcast

🚀 Weekly funding round-up

Blend (🇸🇦 KSA), a SaaS startup enabling hospitality operators to manage their online orders from different food delivery platforms through a single dashboard, has raised $1.3 million in a pre-Seed investment round, backed by an undisclosed group of angel investors.

Qardy (🇪🇬 Egypt), a fintech providing MSMEs with financing solutions to scale, has raised a seven-figure pre-Seed round, led by White Field Ventures, Vastly Valuable Ventures, along with other angel investors.

Blockscout (🇦🇪UAE), an open-source block explorer designed for Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) blockchains, has secured $3 million in seed funding, led by 1kx.

Link (🇸🇦 KSA), a social networking platform offering text messaging, voice and video calls, and real-time conversation translation, has secured a $1.6 million Seed round, led by Core Vision and Saudi investor Badr Al-Arjani.

TWLM (🇸🇦 KSA), a food pick-up app, has raised $270,000 in investment, led by B Group with participation from angel investors.

The following startups all raised $150,000 after graduating from Oraseya Capital’s SANDBOX accelerator.

Qureos (🇦🇪UAE), a recruitment tech startup on a mission to accelerate 100 million careers by matching talent to mentors, projects and job opportunities.

Herogo (🇦🇪UAE), a sustainable food tech subscription platform that rescues 'odd' and surplus produce at risk of waste, and delivers discounted groceries to consumer doorsteps.

Lisan (🇦🇪UAE), an AI writing platform offering state-of-the-art proofreading and grammar checking to help individuals who write in Arabic to maximise their productivity.

Sthrive (🇦🇪UAE), a SaaS startup that empowers retail teams by boosting productivity and engagement at a lower cost while providing predictive performance data.

Zoya (🇺🇸 USA), a fintech startup making halal investing easy and accessible, providing free Shariah compliance screening data for over 100k Muslim investors to confidently build and monitor their portfolios.

Opteam (🇦🇪UAE), a AI-powered contech that enables project tracking with realtime precision.

JobEscape, a productivity startup up-skilling freelancers and employees.

Fintech

🏷️ Egyptian fintech Lucky ONE raises $3 million round to expand its discounts and credit platform

🏷️ Egypt-based fintech Lucky ONE has raised $3 million in a convertible bond funding round, to expand its range of financial services including credit, discounts, and cashback focusing on serving the unbanked population.

• Ayman Essawy (Chairman), Momtaz Moussa (CEO), and Marwan Kenawy founded Lucky ONE in 2019.

💰 Investor lowdown: The round was led by existing investors; including Lorax Capital Partners, KEM, and DisrupTech Ventures.

• This brings the total Lucky One has raised to date to over $50 million.

• The startup’s previously raised a $25 million Series A back in 2022.

📖 The back story

Lucky ONE was started in 2019 by Dsquares, an Egyptian loyalty and rewards solutions provider, before getting spun out as an independent entity two years later.

Leveraging Dsquares' extensive network of partners, Lucky was launched as a consumer product offering cashback, discounts, and rewards.

⚙️ Breaking it down

Managing loyalty solutions for clients allowed Dsquares to observe transaction patterns and understand local consumer behaviors.

This enabled them to build profiles and credit scores for customers, informing their creditworthiness.

Lucky has since evolved to offer a physical card and credit through installment shopping with its partners.

🐂 Bull case

1. They’ve partnered with over 20,000 local and international stores, offering instant credit approval to its 13 million registered users and issuing 300,000 cards.

2. With strong collection processes and low default rates, the company is scaling its consumer credit vertical effectively.

3. They have already expanded to Morocco, with plans to enter the Saudi market soon.

🔮 Flashforward

Lucky ONE is aiming to be profitable by the first quarter of 2025, and plans to use the latest funds to expand its credit services.

💰 VC round-up

💸 Nvidia has acquired Brev.dev, a San Francisco-based AI and machine learning development platform startup, marking an exit for Saudi-based VC firm Nama Ventures. Founded by YC alums Alecsander Fong (CTO), Ali Ahmed (COO), and Nader Khalil (CEO), Brev.dev raised an undisclosed amount in pre-seed funding from Nama Ventures in 2022. Nama Ventures, founded by Mohamed Alzubi, focuses on early-stage innovation in the MENA region, particularly Saudi Arabia. The acquisition price remains undisclosed. This is Nvidia’s fourth acquisition of the year as they expand their DGX Cloud service for enterprise AI app development.

• Highly recommend checking out this podcast for more on CEO Nader Khalil’s background, as the son of Lebanese immigrant parents, and early YouTuber who created videos teaching Arabic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRWJmEnrGB8

🇪🇬 Egypt-based VC-incubator T-Vencubator has launched its first initiative, "Where's the Problem?" to support the Egyptian startup ecosystem. Founded in 2023 by Reem Safy, T-Vencubator aims to help entrepreneurs overcome financial and expertise-related challenges. The initiative plans to invest in five local startups by 2025, blending venture capital with incubator benefits to ensure growth and success. T-Vencubator offers mentorship, guidance, technological infrastructure, human resources, and a supportive environment to foster innovative ideas and support entrepreneurs.

🤖 Meta has partnered with Startupbootcamp MENA to promote AI use cases in the MENA business landscape. Startupbootcamp, a global accelerator network, connects startups with mentors, partners, and investors. This collaboration will leverage Meta’s Llama 3.1 open-source Large Language Model (LLM) for innovation and product development, addressing regional business challenges. Selected startups will have the opportunity to join a global Meta-sponsored program and could receive up to $500,000 to advance their product development.

🖥️ Tech round-up

📊 Oracle has launched its second public cloud region in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, aiming to support the Kingdom's $135 billion AI economy. This new region, hosted by Center3, enables public and private sectors to migrate workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), offering services for application modernisation, data analytics, and AI innovation.

Part of Oracle's distributed cloud strategy and $1.5 billion investment in the Kingdom, this initiative complements the existing Jeddah region and the planned NEOM region, enhancing Oracle’s presence in Saudi Arabia.

💰 VC React Podcast: Episode 6

In last week's episode of the VC React Podcast, I finally managed to find an Irish angle and steered our conversation about Educatly's $2.5 million round into a discussion about why Egyptian edtech startups, in particular, are choosing Ireland as a base to scale. We also chatted about Saudi-based AI startup Intelmatix's $20 million Series A funding round, what exactly enterprise AI is, and alternative education models that place entrepreneurship at the core of their offering.

‍This week Ahmad and I had the tremendous pleasure to be joined by:‍

• Dr. Adil Alzarooni (CEO at Al Zarooni Emirates Investments)

• Faisal Hakki (Managing Director at AB Ventures LP)

• Mohammed Al Rasbi (Founder & GP at R&D Labs)

📆 Events and opportunities

🤖 A 10-week equity-free accelerator program for Seed to Series A startups based in MENA and Turkey.

The accelerator aims to connect the best of Google's products and people to empower startups to scale their business, towards success in the rapidly evolving landscape of AI and technology.

📰 Previous deep-dives

• Tackling MENA's mental health. How startups in the region are battling stigma and promoting mental wellness

• Building a ChatGPT for the Arab World. Meet the companies and countries that are leading the way

• Getting medicine to MENA doorsteps. And the startups disrupting the pharma industry