1. Anabolic (🇸🇦 KSA), a foodtech start-up offering customised meal plans tailored to fit individual lifestyles and dietary preferences, has raised a $9 million Seed round from undisclosed investors.

2. The Digital Hotelier (🇦🇪 UAE), a traveltech start-up providing an SaaS platform designed to streamline hospitality operations, has raised $1 million in a Seed round led by Silicon Valley-based VC firm Plug and Play, Bahrain’s Hope Fund, and a group of angel investors.

3. Bookr (🇰🇼 Kuwait), a SaaS-enabled marketplace for locating and booking beauty services, has raised a bridge round at an undisclosed amount from Plus VC.

🎙️ Meet CAMB.AI! A UAE-based mediatech startup that leverages speech AI technology to instantly dub performances in over 100 languages, dialects, and accents, while retaining the original voices and nuances.

And, they just raised $4 million in their seed funding round.

• Founded in 2022 by Avneesh Prakash and Akshat Prakash, the company says it has surpassed 100 million views of its dubbed content to date, and has forged partnerships with companies like Major League Soccer and Tennis Australia.

💰 Investor lowdown: The round was led by Courtside Ventures, along with TRTL Ventures, Blue Star Innovation Partners, Ikemori Ventures, and Eisaburo Maeda.

• TRTL and the Dubai Future District Fund were early investors in the company.

🔚 End to end 

Traditional translation and dubbing methods often miss the mark, failing to capture the emotional depth, subtleties, and colloquialisms that enrich content.

CAMB.AI's suite of video and audio production tools are engineered to enable creators to transcend linguistic, cultural, and geographical barriers.

• The key? They don’t just translate speech—they preserve the speaker's emotional intensity and nuances, ensuring content remains as impactful in any language.

⚙️ Break it down 

To address the challenges of voice localisation, CAMB.AI created two technologies from the ground up; MARS TTS and BOLI Translator.

• MARS TTS (Text-to-speech): Retains the original voice's emotional and tonal nuances, ensuring authentic and emotionally resonant dubbed content.

• BOLI translation LLM: Manages the complexities of various dialects and linguistic nuances, to provide translations that are both accurate and culturally resonant.

The aim? Inclusivity in global communication.

• CAMB.AI, even processes less commonly supported languages like Afrikaans, Malay, and Basque!

🎾 Game. Set. Match.

At the 2024 Australian Open, CAMB.AI's technology provided AI-driven multilingual dubbing and translation for players' post-match press conferences ☝️

🔮 Flashforward: 

The fresh funding will be used by CAMB.AI to fast-track further development and global expansion.

🗝️ Here’s Rize! The Saudi-based proptech platform providing a rent-now-pay-later solution that allows tenants across KSA to pay their rent in flexible monthly instalments.

And they just secured a $2.9 million Seed round!

• Co-founded in 2021 by Ibrahim Balilah and Mohammed AlFraihi, the platform currently has a user base of over 16,000 users across KSA.

💰 Investor lowdown: This round was supported by Seedra Ventures, Hala Ventures, JOA Capital, RZM Investments, Bonat Investments, and Nama Ventures, along with a group of angel investors. 

• Rize has also secured additional capital through debt financing from various sources, to bolster its investments in the real estate sector.

🤸‍♀️ Not so flexible

Nearly 70% of residential rental contracts in Saudi Arabia are structured on an annual or semi-annual basis.

This less flexible model often places a heavy financial burden on tenants, making it difficult for many, particularly young professionals and growing families, to manage their cash flows effectively.

🔑 Rizing to the challenge

Rize switches things up enabling tenants to rent any unit of their choice and pay their lease in flexible monthly instalments, rather than the traditional lump-sum payments.

• It also streamlines property rentals through unified Ejari contracts, an electronic system by Saudi Arabia's Real Estate General Authority, ensuring transparent transactions.

👪 For tenants? A user-friendly platform offers ease of leasing, flexibility with monthly payments to match income cycles, and affordability by reducing upfront costs.

🔑 For landlords? Receiving full lease term rent upfront ensures stability, more attractive listings boost demand for quicker occupancies, and Ejar provides a streamlined approach to lease management and payments.

The result: A win-win - tenants get financial flexibility, and landlords can entice and retain more applicants in an ever-competitive market.

• Did we mention that their rental solutions are fully Shariah compliant?

🔮 Flashforward: 

Rize will use the fresh funding to fuel its expansion across KSA.

🇧🇭 PLAYBOOK, a leading platform for women's career development, has acquired Women Spark, a Saudi-based women's angel investment group with over 4,000 members worldwide, to enhance its impact on the professional and financial growth of women by merging resources and expertise. This acquisition aims to create a supportive ecosystem for women to excel in leadership and investment, building on Women Spark's track record of investing in 17 startups since its founding in 2013.

🇦🇪 Last weekend at The Sharjah Entrepreneurship Festival, the Pitch Competition showcased over 100 startups from countries like Canada and Egypt across five tracks: Tourism, Creative, Tech, EdTech, and Impact, with each winner awarded AED 50,000.

• SparkleHaze, AR Engineering, Esaal, and The Waste Lab emerged as winners in their respective categories.

🇦🇪 India-headquartered Klub has recently gained regulatory approval from Abu Dhabi Global Markets (ADGM), making them the first revenue based financing (RBF)-focused credit fund to expand in the Middle East region.

• Levelling up. Why isn’t the MENA startup ecosystem more robust?

  Not good. AI Launches Nukes In ‘Worrying’ War Simulation: ‘I Just Want to Have Peace in the World’

• MickeyVerse. Disney invests $1.5B in Fortnite maker Epic Games to build a persistent game universe

• Reading time. Review: Chris Dixon's Read Write Own

👋 Message from the team

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