Happy Friday! The amount raised by MENA startups rebounded in a big way last month, with $355 million raised by 38 startups - a 206% rise on June!

We have the key takeaways for you - Egypt's resurgence, fintech's enduring appeal, and the ongoing funding gap for female founders - in this week's round-up.

P.S. If you missed our weekly deep-dive where we explored the scale of the food waste problem in the MENA region, and broke down how Saudi startup Barakah is tackling the challenge in The Kingdom, you can check it out here.

This week’s round-up is a 5 min read:

• 📈 MENA startup funding trebles in July, with $355 million raised

• 🥙 UAE foodtech MealPlanet secures $6m Seed round to expand meal plan delivery platform

• 👓 PIF, Magic Leap, and a case of sunk cost fallacy

• 🔈 Catch-up on Episode 7 of the VC React Podcast

🚀 Startup funding round-up

MealPlanet (🇦🇪UAE) a foodtech delivery platform that aggregates over 100 meal plan providers, has raised a $6 million Seed round, led by Middle East Venture Partners (MEVP), AlTouq Group, Sanabil 500, Faith Capital, and Alturki Ventures, as well as renowned entrepreneurs Marc Lore and Samih Toukan.

• Founded by Khalid Baareh, who previously achieved an exit with the acquisition of his cloud kitchen platform iKcon in 2021, MealPlanet intends to expand across MENA, starting with Saudi Arabia in Q1 2025.

Kem (🇰🇼 Kuwait), a fintech P2P platform that allows users to send money instantly using QR codes without needing payment links or traditional accounts, has raised a $3 million investment from Tether, the crypto stablecoin provider and world’s largest company in the digital asset industry.

Athir (🇸🇦 KSA), a healthtech company providing healthcare and revenue management systems, medical insurance solutions, and smart device apps for integrated medical records, has raised an undisclosed amount, backed by Wa’ed Ventures, SHARE Investment Co., and RZM Investment.

Startup ecosystem

📈 MENA startup funding trebles in July, with $355 million raised

📈 Investment in MENA startups surged in July 2024, with $355 million raised by 38 startups - a 206% increase MoM and over 260% YoY.

 🔑 Key takeaways

• Top country: Despite several months of hardship, Egyptian entrepreneurs secured the highest funding in the region, raising $185 million over seven deals.

• Deal count: No change from June, with 38 transactions.

• Top industry: Fintech remains a good old investor favourite, drawing $181 million invested across 16 startups.

• Model: B2B attracted the most investment for the second consecutive month, with $345 million going to 27 B2B businesses. In contrast, only 9 B2C startups raised almost $8 million, while the remaining funds went to two B2B2C startups.

• Gender breakdown: Only two female-led startups raised $270k, accounting for just 0.01% of overall funding. 5.8% went to mixed-gender founders.

• Debt financing: Only 1% of total funding came from debt financing last month, compared to 17% across H1.

• Stage: The majority of investment went to seed-stage startups, with eight of them raising $96 million, closely followed by Series A, receiving $91.7 million across eight deals.

• Exits: The key deal was the acquisition of BitOasis by the India-based crypto exchange company CoinDCX.

🧐 Analysis

I’m going to cheekily hold off on analysing the key takeaways above right now because we’ve just recorded a VC React podcast episode with Amal Dokhan (500 Global), Hamed Masri (Silicon Badia) and Issa Aghabi (Access Bridge Ventures) where we do just that - and if I do say so myself, it’s well worth an hour of your time.

It’ll be released on LinkedIn in the next few days, so feel free to follow me there if you don’t want to wait until next Friday’s edition!

💰 Global investments round-up

🇸🇦🇺🇸 Saudi Arabia’s PIF has invested $750 million in Magic Leap since early 2023, solidifying its position as the majority owner. This includes $160 million this year, on top of $590 million last year. Magic Leap, a Florida-based developer of AR devices and software (you might recall their viral whale video a number of years ago), has raised at least $3.5 billion to date but reported in recent UK filings that it needs additional funds later this month, as well as in January and June 2025, to meet its obligations. Despite a new partnership with Google, the company cut 75 jobs in July as they attempt to shift their focus to tech licensing.

🇸🇦🇦🇪🇬🇧 UK-based industrial tech startup CorrosionRADAR has raised $6.35 million in Series B funding, led by Aramco Ventures, Kanoo Ventures, and other global investors. Founded in 2017, CorrosionRADAR specialises in helping energy companies optimise inspections and maintenance using advanced sensing technology and predictive analytics.

🇦🇪🇺🇸 Flyr, US-based travel tech startup, raised $295M in a series D funding round of both equity & debt from Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) and other global investors. The startup was founded in 2013 and provides airlines like JetBlue and Virgin Atlantic with an AI/ML powered Saas platform that helps optimise their operations.

🖥️ Tech round-up

🤖 G42’s R&D company Inception has open-sourced Jais 70B, their most powerful Arabic NLP model yet, along with 20 other AI models. Jais 70B was pre-trained on the largest Arabic dataset ever used for an open-source model. This release marks the largest single launch of large language models in MENA.

🇸🇦 aramco and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) are committing $100 million over the next decade to research and development. This investment will target energy transition, sustainability, materials innovation, upstream technologies, and digital solutions, aiming for environmental and commercial gains. The partnership also prioritizes sustainable technologies like carbon capture, supporting Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 to reduce dependence on hydrocarbons.

🦾 Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute (TII) has released Falcon Mamba 7B, a large language model using State Space Language Model (SSLM) architecture, departing from traditional transformer designs. Verified by Hugging Face as the top open-source SSLM, Falcon Mamba 7B handles longer text sequences efficiently with consistent performance and lower memory usage. Tests on GPUs like the NVIDIA A10 showed its superior ability to process extended text inputs, making it ideal for applications requiring large document analysis or continuous text generation.

🇰🇼 Kuwait has officially launched securities-based crowdfunding platforms, nearly two years after an initial fintech regulation draft. Announced by Minister Omar Al-Omar, the initiative aims to diversify financing options for startups and small businesses, providing entrepreneurs with an alternative way to raise capital through licensed digital platforms.

💰 VC React Podcast: Episode 7

In this week's episode of the VC React Podcast, we discuss NVIDIA's acquisition of Brev.dev, a portfolio company of the Saudi VC firm Nama Ventures. We explore the advantages of being a technical VC, examine how Lucky ONE was spun out of Dsquares and how its inception enabled the team to observe transaction patterns and better understand local consumer behaviours. And to top things off, we collectively provide a very quick and superficial review of the graduates from Oraseya Capital's Sandbox Accelerator program.

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

• Saud Alsahhaf (Senior Associate at Impact46)

• Zeina Mandour (Venture Investment Manager at Dar Ventures)

📆 Events and opportunities

Applications are now open for Cohort 6 of Plug and Play's Egypt program, in partnership with the Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA), USAID, and the National Bank of Egypt (NBE).

Hosted at the Sultan Hussein Kamel CREATIVA Innovation Hub, this 3-month program is ideal for MVP or growth-stage startups across various industries, including E-commerce, Fintech, Cybersecurity, Enterprise Tech, Sustainability, and more.

Learn more and apply before August 25th 👇

📰 Previous deep-dives

• Femtech's uphill struggle. Despite women accounting for half of MENA's population, research focusing solely on women’s health issues receives little funding

• MENA has entered the game. Nearly half the region's population is under 25, can it become a world leader in the video game industry?

• MENA's education problem. And how edtech startups and AI are disrupting private tutoring