Happy Friday! This is our final regular edition of the year, and what a year it’s been. Thank you for being part of it, and to everyone celebrating, Happy Holidays! ❄️

We’ll be back in early January with the FWDstart 2024 Year in Review — looking back at this year’s major stories, trends, and sharing predictions for 2025.

In the meantime, enjoy this week’s edition 👇

This week’s round-up is a 5 min read:

• 💸 UAE’s CredibleX secures $55M to boost SME financing

• 🇸🇦 SVC backs MEVP’s $150M fourth fund and RAED Ventures’ $150M third fund

• 🤖 Oman Investment Authority invests in Elon Musk's xAI

• 🎶 Music streaming app Anghami raises $55 million from OSN Group

🚀 Startup funding round-up

CredibleX (🇦🇪 UAE), a fintech platform providing lending solutions for SMEs, has raised $55 million in Seed funding, led by Further Ventures, with debt financing from Kilgour Williams Capital and others.

Klickl (🇦🇪 UAE), a Web3-focused platform, raised $25 million in a Series A round, led by Web3Port and Aptos Labs, with participation from Summer Ventures, Heritage Horizon Capital, Alpha Square Group, and others.

OmniOps (🇸🇦 KSA), an AI infrastructure technology provider of cutting-edge cloud and high-performance computing (HPC) solutions, has raised $8 million in funding from GMS Capital Ventures.

Revibe (🇦🇪 UAE), a B2C marketplace specialising in refurbished electronics, has closed a $7 million Series A round led by ISAI and Resonance, with participation from Kima Ventures.

InvoiceQ (🇯🇴 Jordan), a SaaS company specialising in e-invoicing for enterprises, has raised $1.2 million in pre-Series A funding from Oasis500, Orange VC, Flat6Labs, and angel investors.

Unipal (🇧🇭 Bahrain), an online education platform providing special offers and discounts to university students, has closed an undisclosed Pre-Series A round led by Falak Investment Hub.

💰 VC round-up

💸 SVC has announced an investment in MEVP’s $150M Middle East Venture Fund IV. The fund, anchored by the European Investment Bank (EIB), focuses on Seed to Series B startups across the GCC, Levant, and North Africa.

• MEVP has invested over $50M in Saudi startups since 2012, creating 12,000+ jobs and attracting $1.1B in co-investments.

• Notable Saudi-based startups backed by MEVP to date include; HALA, Nana, Invygo, and OTO.

💵 SVC has invested in RAED Fund III (target size $150M), managed by RAED Ventures, targeting early-stage startups (Seed and Series A) in fintech and SaaS across MENA, with a focus on Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

• Since its establishment in 2016, RAED has invested in over 50 companies including Tabby, Salla, Foodics, Lean Technologies, Mrsool, and Trella.

• RAED is anchored by top investors in the region including Saudi Venture Capital (SVC), PIF’s Jada, Mubadala, Almajdouie Holding.

🇮🇶 Iraq Venture Partners (IVP) has secured $2.7M from the Kingdom of the Netherlands to launch the second phase of the Orange Corners Innovation Fund (OCIF) in Baghdad. The fund will provide Iraqi entrepreneurs with technical expertise, access to networks, and direct financial support. It builds on the success of the Orange Corners Program managed by KAPITA, further strengthening Iraq’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.

🇨🇭🇦🇪 The Hashgraph Group, a tech and investment firm focused on the Hedera ecosystem, has secured a venture capital fund manager license from ADGM and announced a $100 million global venture fund. The Hashgraph Venture Fund-I will invest in startups leveraging AI, blockchain/DLT, robotics, and quantum computing, with $20 million seeded by The Hashgraph Association (THA).

🌍 Global investments round-up

🇴🇲 The Oman Investment Authority (OIA) has acquired an undisclosed stake in Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, as part of its strategy to diversify its global portfolio. Founded in July last year to compete with OpenAI, xAI recently raised $6 billion, bringing its valuation to $50 billion. Investors include Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, Kingdom Holding of Saudi Arabia, and prominent VC firms like Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.

♻️ Wa’ed Ventures, aramco’s $500M venture fund, has led a $5M investment in Excess Materials Exchange (EME), a Dutch platform focused on recycling surplus materials between companies. The investment will support the platform’s relocation to Saudi Arabia and the localisation of its technologies.

🤖 Crusoe, an AI infrastructure company, has raised $600M in a Series D round at a $2.8B valuation, with Mubadala joining as a key investor alongside Founders Fund, NVIDIA, and others. The funding will accelerate Crusoe’s global expansion, including its Crusoe Cloud platform designed for AI and machine learning.

👖 LAAM, a clothing retailer specialising in South Asian fashion, has closed a $5.5M seed round led by UAE-based Disrupt.com and Zayn VC, with support from Oracle, Microsoft, and Google. The funding will help LAAM establish a Middle East hub, expand its designer network, and scale globally. Offering over 100,000 outfits from 1,000+ brands, LAAM serves key markets in the Middle East, USA, UK, Canada, and Pakistan.

💸 UAE-based G42 has made a strategic investment in Inveniam, a fintech company focused on private markets. The partnership aims to leverage AI to transform the valuation, management, and trading of private assets, including real estate, private equity, and infrastructure.

📈 Tech

🕹️ Dubai has officially launched medicine and parcel deliveries via drones, with the Dubai Civil Aviation Authority awarding the first license to Keeta Drone. Initial operations include six drones covering four routes in Dubai Silicon Oasis, with plans to expand citywide. Keeta Drone, a subsidiary of China’s Meituan, is the first Chinese drone logistics operator to secure an overseas license. Since launching in 2021, it has completed over 400,000 deliveries across 53 routes in major Chinese cities and offers a selection of 90,000+ products.

🎶 Lebanon-founded music streaming app Anghami has raised $55 million from OSN Group, including $12 million via a convertible note. Founded in 2011, Anghami merged with OSN+ in April, with OSN+ now holding a 55.45% majority stake. The funding will drive content expansion and growth for both platforms. Anghami, listed on NASDAQ, also saw Saudi Arabia's MBC Group acquire a 13.7% stake earlier this year.

 🏦 Fintech

📲 D360 Bank, one of three licensed digital banks in Saudi Arabia, has been approved by the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA) to commence operations with a capital of SAR 1.65 billion. The fully digital, Shariah-compliant bank offers seamless account opening, no-fee currency exchanges, low-cost transfers, and 24/7 secure banking via the D360 app.

🪙 Bitpanda, Europe’s crypto platform, has received in-principle approval from Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) just eight months after applying. Operating as Bitpanda Broker MENA DMCC, this marks the platform's first venture outside Europe. Bitpanda opened its Dubai office earlier this year at the DMCC Crypto Centre and partnered with RAKBANK and CoinMENA.

 🤖 AI

🦾 Hub71 has launched Hub71+ AI. Backed by Core42 (G42), which provides sovereign cloud infrastructure and AI training, and AI71 offering generative AI tools like Falcon LLMs, the initiative is further supported by strategic partners including AWS, Google, Nvidia, and MBZUAI. Startups gain access to advanced technology, R&D opportunities, regulatory guidance, and market entry pathways, enabling them to scale globally.

🚀 Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute (TII) has launched Falcon 3, a series of small language models (1B-10B) trained on 14 trillion tokens, leading the Hugging Face leaderboard for sub-13B models. Efficient on laptops and single GPUs, Falcon 3 supports multiple languages, excels in reasoning and code generation, and offers variants for diverse applications. From January 2025, it will expand to include text, image, video, and voice capabilities.

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