Happy Friday, friends 👋

We hope you and yours are safe and well.

Unsurprisingly, announcements on the home front remain exceedingly muted, but not to worry as this week's headline takes us to the diaspora, with Jordan's Amjad Masad raising again for Replit, just six months after his last round, tripling the vibe coding platform's valuation to $9B in a $400M Series D.

In the process, Masad has become a billionaire, per Forbes, worth an estimated $2B. The raise coincides with the launch of Replit Agent 4, a next-gen agent that lets you plan, design, and build simultaneously without waiting for one task to finish before starting the next.

Separately, and off the back of disclosing their first five investments from the Presight-Shorooq AI Fund, Shorooq has revealed that they’re an investor in Yann LeCun's AMI Labs.

The Paris-headquartered venture from the former Meta chief AI scientist and Turing Award winner has gone live with one of the largest seed financings in history, pulling in $1.03B at a $3.5B pre-money valuation.

Only a European AI lab would raise a billion dollars and still feel the need to specify the extra thirty million. In any case, billion-dollar seeds are just how we do things now.

Stay safe, and we'll see you again next week.

This and much more below 👇

This week’s round-up is a 5 min read:

Muhlah (🇸🇦 KSA), a SAMA-licensed fintech providing Shariah-compliant consumer microfinance, has raised $7.5M in a Seed round, led by BIM Ventures and SBI Group, with participation from AlSuhaimi Holding Group and Fakhr Investment Holding Company.

ShipBee (🇶🇦 Qatar), an AI-powered digital logistics platform offering a unified marketplace, driver and user apps, and SaaS tools for businesses managing local and international shipping operations, has raised $500K in a Seed round, led by GrowthX Capital.

Weekly deep dives, founder and VC playbooks, the Careem Mafia Database, the MENA Tech IPO Tracker, the Diaspora 50, and two years of archived analysis

🇯🇴 Jordanian founder Amjad Masad's Replit raised a $400M Series D at a $9B valuation, tripling its value in just six months and making Masad a billionaire for the first time (estimated $2B per Forbes). The AI-powered coding platform is targeting $1B in ARR by end of 2026 and plans to use the funds for international expansion in Asia and the Middle East. The round was led by Georgian with participation from QIA, G Squared, Coatue, Andreessen Horowitz, Craft Ventures, Y Combinator, and Donald Trump Jr's 1789 Capital, alongside angels Shaquille O'Neal and Jared Leto, bringing total funding to approximately $878M.

🧠 Shorooq has participated in AMI Labs' $1.03B Seed round, one of the largest seed financings an AI startup has ever raised, valuing the company at approximately $3.5B pre-money. AMI Labs was founded by Turing Award winner and former Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun, who serves as Executive Chair and is building "world models" AI architectures that learn from spatial and real-world data to reason about cause and effect in physical environments. The round was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, and Bezos Expeditions, with participation from Temasek, Nvidia, Mark Cuban, and Eric Schmidt. LeCun appeared as an angel investor across Shorooq's Presight-Shorooq Fund I portfolio, which disclosed its first five investments in February after screening over 1,000 companies.

🇴🇲 Oman's sovereign wealth fund has led a $131.5M round in Uzbekistan's Uzum, valuing the fintech super-app at $2.3B – up 53% from its $1.5B valuation just seven months ago. The investment includes $81.5M in equity and $50M in convertible financing tied to a potential $250-300M pre-IPO raise in late 2026 or early 2027, with Uzum exploring listings in the US, Europe, Middle East, and Southeast Asia. The company reported $691M in revenue and $176M net income in 2025, with its digital bank serving around 5 million customers and issuing half of all debit cards in Uzbekistan last year.

🚀 QIA has invested in Vast's $500M round, backing the Long Beach-based company developing next-gen commercial space stations to succeed the International Space Station. The round, comprising $300M in Series A equity and $200M in debt, was led by Balerion Space Ventures with participation from IQT, Mitsui, MUFG, Nikon, and Space Capital. Vast's Haven-1 is expected to become the world's first commercial space station when it launches in 2027, with additional modules enabling permanent human presence by 2030.

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🚗 Global ride-hailing company inDrive has acquired Pakistan-based quick-commerce startup Krave Mart in an all-stock deal approved by the Competition Commission of Pakistan, per TechCrunch. Founded in 2021, Krave Mart operates dark stores delivering groceries in ~30 minutes across Karachi, Rawalpindi, and Lahore. The acquisition follows inDrive's December 2024 investment in Krave Mart through its $100M venture and M&A arm, launched in 2023 to bolster its super-app strategy. inDrive is the world's second-most downloaded ride-hailing app since 2022 and the most downloaded in nine countries including Egypt, Morocco, and Pakistan.

🛒 Algerian super app Yassir has acquired the Uno hypermarket chain from Cevital Group, marking its entry into brick-and-mortar retail with plans to rebrand stores as "Yassir Market." Founded in 2016 by Stanford PhD and ex-Silicon Valley engineer Noureddine Tayebi, Yassir operates across six countries and 50+ cities with over 10 million users, offering ride-hailing, food delivery, and mobile payments. The stores will use Yassir Cash for transactions (supported by 5k+ agents) and integrate with the Yassir+ loyalty program.

🛍️ Egypt-based martech startup Converted has acquired Mitcha, the Egyptian e-commerce platform supporting local fashion designers founded in 2018. Mitcha founder Hilda Louca, a Shark Tank Egypt investor, joins Converted as partner and executive director to lead strategic partnerships and regional expansion. The deal accelerates the launch of Converted Orders, a platform connecting digital advertising directly to verified sales data rather than clicks. Converted (formerly Convertedin) was founded in 2019 by Mohamed Fergany and raised a $3M seed led by Merak Capital in 2022, with the company serving thousands of merchants across Egypt and Saudi Arabia with AI-powered ad management across Google, Meta, and TikTok.

🏦 IHC subsidiary Judan Financial is acquiring a 50.1% stake in Alpha Wave Global, the US-based investment manager with approximately $29B in AUM across private equity, private credit, public markets, and insurance. The deal gives Abu Dhabi exposure to Alpha Wave's AI-heavy portfolio, which includes SpaceX (its largest investment), Anthropic, OpenAI, Cerebras, and Ramp. Alpha Wave will use the backing to accelerate its AI-native US life insurance and retirement solutions vertical. Judan Financial, established in 2026, is expected to oversee more than 20 financial services companies across 13+ countries managing in excess of $235B in assets upon completion of planned contributions.