💵 T-Vencubator, a new VC-incubator fund has launched in Egypt. Combining business incubation and venture capital, T-Vencubator plans to launch its first program in July 2024 and invest in five early to series A stage startups within the year.

💰 Riyadh Valley Company, King Saud University's investment arm, has made an undisclosed investment in IMPACT46’s third fund. Launched in 2019 by Abdulaziz Alomran, IMPACT46 specialises in alternative investments, focusing on tech startups from growth to pre-IPO stages.

• Fund III targets investments in sectors like fintech, e-commerce, SaaS, and more, both locally and globally.

🌍 Singapore's Golden Gate Ventures, a global early-stage VC firm founded in 2011, has opened an office in Saudi Arabia. As a global early-stage venture capital firm, it has invested in over 90 companies, including nine unicorns and two IPOs. The firm has supported the MENA startup ecosystem through key partnerships like Endeavour.

🇯🇴 Amam Ventures, in collaboration with IFC and the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, has launched the second cohort of Scale Jordan, a 10-week program designed to prepare startups and SMEs for investment. While not offering direct funding, the program provides expert coaching, mentorship, and strategic business skills essential for securing future funding and building a strong foundation for success.

🛠️ Say hello to The Riyadh Techstars Accelerator’s 12 newest graduates! The Riyadh-based accelerator marked this milestone at a Demo Day as part of the #TechXpand event earlier this month.

This class includes startups not only from Saudi Arabia but also from the wider Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and Europe, showcasing a diverse range of sectors such as AI, EdTech, eCommerce, and HealthTech.

The program, which spans 13 weeks, offers participating companies numerous benefits under Techstars' proven model. This includes funding and fundraising opportunities, workshops, curated resources, mentorship, and access to a vast network of partners, investors, and alumni.

• The programme is a collaborative effort with the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (MCIT), RAED Ventures, and the Saudi National Bank (SNB).

📝Let’s introduce you to the graduating start-ups, shall we…

Here’s Imaginario! A startup that empowers companies to build video search and curation workflows with a powerful vector-based API and no-code platform, has announced a $1 million pre-seed round led by Tunisian 216 Ventures.

• Founded in 2021 by Jose M. Puga and Abdelhak Loukkal PhD, Imaginario, the underlying AI powering the platform was developed in the US while participating in the Comcast Lift Labs Accelerator powered by Techstars, a mediatech incubator with a less-than-1% acceptance rate.

💰 Investor lowdown: The funding round was led by 216 Capital, alongside Blue Lake VC, Earthling Ventures, Comcast NBCUniversal, Techstars and angel investors, including AI engineers from Meta and Google.

🎞️ Throwback

Traditional video content management relies heavily on manual time-stamping and labelling, a process that is labor-intensive, prone to inaccuracies, and difficult to maintain.

Additionally, most online video search capabilities are restricted to keyword searches within auto-generated transcripts, limiting the scope of searchability.

🚀 AI-driven automation

Imaginario’s AI technology streamlines video content management by making entire libraries searchable across visuals, sound, and dialogue with minimal processing and no human intervention.

This is achieved through an AI system which turns human-recognisable elements (such as objects, sounds, actions and emotions) into mathematical objects, which can be searched, curated and modified.

Imaginario’s first product, which enables content creators to automatically discover, clip, and reframe video content for social media platforms, is already employed by several Hollywood studios, who have reported over a 60% reduction in the time taken to identify, edit and repurpose traditional broadcast video and feature films for social platforms.

Smaller content creators are also using the platform, which starts at $34 per month, to automate the creation of shareable clips from podcasts and other long-form conversational content.

🔮 Flashforward

The fresh funding will enable the startup to consolidate its development and expand its engineering and sales teams in the United States, Europe and the MENA region.

👋 Message from the team

Thanks for reading! Have a terrific weekend and we’ll see you all again next Friday.

Regular programming will resume soon, starting with a new series every Tuesday in January that delves into the world of EdTech in the MENA region.

Have a question or any feedback? Just hit reply, or provide a rating below.

Wishing you all a Happy New Year from all the team at FWDstart ✨ 🐢

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