This week's edition is especially jam-packed, so much so that we'd recommend reading it online if at all possible.

Happy Friday friends 👋

Jeff Bezos has become the latest Silicon Valley figurehead to make the pilgrimage to the Gulf, pitching SWFs on a $100 billion manufacturing automation fund that would, if it closes at that scale, rival SoftBank's Vision Fund as the largest private investment vehicle ever assembled.

He joins a queue that now includes Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Elon Musk, all of whom have made the trip in recent months to shake the same money tree for their variously compute-intensive and monetarily intensive AI ambitions (the Gulf, for its part, has seemed perfectly happy to keep receiving visitors, though it'll be interesting to see how the current regional climate alters the fanfare that greets them moving forwards).

It's been a busy week beyond the Bezos circus. Kalshi, co-founded by Lebanese-raised Tarek Mansour, has raised over $1 billion at a $22 billion valuation, doubling its value for the third time in under a year. Scalvy, founded by an Egyptian and Sudanese engineering duo based in Austin, has raised just under $14 million to tackle AI's power infrastructure bottleneck.

Lean Technologies has become the first company authorised to provide open banking services commercially in Saudi Arabia. And Delivery Hero has agreed to sell Foodpanda Taiwan to Grab for $600 million, raising questions about the JPMorgan-led strategic review currently underway at the parent company and what it could eventually mean for Talabat and HungerStation.

Ninja remains pretty steadfast in pursuing a Tadawul IPO in 2026 despite regional uncertainty, while Travis Kalanick's CloudKitchens' rumoured IPO for its Middle East subsidiary (KitchenPark) that was shelved in December now seems even more unlikely, given the rebranding of holding company City Storage Systems as Atoms. More on that new robotics venture here.

This and much more below 👇

This week’s round-up is a 5 min read:

zypl.ai (🇦🇪 UAE), an AI platform for financial institutions to enhance credit decisioning and predictive performance, has raised $5.5M in a bridge round at an $80M valuation, led by Carbide Ventures, with participation from Shukhrat Ibragimov and existing investor Prosus Ventures.

GAGA (🇸🇦 KSA), a live interactive edtech platform combining real-time teacher-student instruction with AI-powered personalisation and knowledge gap identification, has raised $2.5M in a pre-Series A round, led by Phoenix Venture Partners, with participation from family offices and individual investors, bringing total funding to $4.2M.

GoSwap (🇲🇦 Morocco), an electric mobility startup building a battery-as-a-service network for electric scooters targeting delivery riders and urban commuters, has raised an undisclosed Seed round as part of a broader $2M+ raise, backed by Azur Innovation Fund.

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📈 Kalshi has raised over $1B at a $22B valuation led by Coatue, doubling its value for the third time in under a year. Monthly trading volume hit $10.4 billion in February (up 11x in six months) with annualised revenue at $1.5 billion. Co-founder Tarek Mansour was born in California but raised in Lebanon until 17, studied at MIT, and worked at Goldman Sachs and Citadel before co-founding Kalshi with Luana Lopes Lara in 2018. Both founders were on the Cheeky Pint podcast with Stripe co-founder John Collison and Sequoia's Matt Huang last week, which we recommend checking out.

⚡ Scalvy, co-founded by Egyptian engineer Mohamed Badawy and Sudanese engineer Amr Ibrahem, has raised $13.9 million in a Series A co-led by Silicon Badia to tackle AI's power infrastructure bottleneck. The Austin-based company's Power Neuron platform distributes power conversion across compact modules at load points, enabling megawatt-level scaling without redesigning existing infrastructure. "Every conversation in tech right now is about AI compute," said Silicon Badia's Namek Zu'bi. "What's getting far less attention is the power infrastructure that has to feed all of it." Badawy studied at Cairo University before a PhD at Akron; Ibrahem studied at the University of Khartoum.

💰 Abu Dhabi-based Phoenix Venture Partners has completed the third closing of its inaugural fund, attracting investors from the US, France, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the UAE including institutions, family offices, and HNWIs. The fund targets early-stage startups across fintech, healthtech, edtech, mobility, agrifood, energy, and consumer tech with a MENA focus. PVP completed its second close of the $50 million fund in March 2025 and remains open for commitments ahead of a final close in October 2026. This week the firm led a $2.5 million pre-Series A in GAGA, the Saudi edtech platform offering live, interactive learning for students aged 4 to 18.

🏦 Lean Technologies has received a Major Payment Institution licence for open banking from SAMA, becoming the first company authorised to provide open banking services commercially in Saudi Arabia. The licence marks the end of a journey that began in June 2022 when Lean was the first Technical Service Provider admitted to SAMA's sandbox. Since then, the company has connected over 1.1 million bank accounts and analysed more than one billion transactions in Saudi, working with clients including Tabby, Tamara, and ByteDance. Founded in 2019 by Hisham Al-Falih, Aditya Sarkar, and Ashu Gupta (who departed nine months ago to found Agnax Labs, since acquired by OrbitronAI), Lean has processed over $2B in transaction volume across the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

🎰 Blackstone has invested $250 million in ADGT, a newly established Abu Dhabi-based payments and data intelligence platform for regulated digital markets including gaming. ADGT was launched through a partnership between Blackstone, Raya Holding, and gaming payments specialists NRT Technology and Sightline. The platform is currently the only licensed provider able to contract with both land-based venues and online digital platforms in the UAE's nascent commercial gaming market. Blackstone has been in the UAE since 2010, with existing investments including GLIDE and Property Finder.

🛵 Delivery Hero has agreed to sell Foodpanda Taiwan to Grab for $600M, a deal the Berlin-based company described as "a key first step" in a JPMorgan-supported strategic review. The proceeds will go toward debt repayment. For MENA, the sale raises questions about whether further asset sales could eventually touch Delivery Hero's regional holdings like Talabat (80% stake, listed on DFM, stock down 56% from IPO price) and HungerStation (full control, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain). Neither has been named in divestiture discussions, but the "first step" framing leaves the door open. Foodpanda never operated under its own name in MENA but was the foundation of Delivery Hero's regional dominance through the Hellofood/HungerStation merger in 2016.

🤖 Travis Kalanick has rebranded his holding company City Storage Systems as Atoms, a robotics venture absorbing CloudKitchens into a broader platform targeting food automation, mining, and autonomous transport. The rebrand raises questions about shelved Middle East IPO plans – Bloomberg reported in September 2025 that CloudKitchens had added JPMorgan, SNB Capital, and FAB to its adviser roster alongside Goldman Sachs for a potential dual listing in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi at a $2 billion valuation. PIF invested $400 million in CloudKitchens in 2019, and Kalanick was granted Saudi citizenship in October 2025 under Vision 2030. CloudKitchens operates in the Gulf under the KitchenPark brand across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain.

🥷 Despite regional uncertainty, Saudi q-commerce startup Ninja is still evaluating a Tadawul IPO in 2026, engaging with investors at a recent London banking conference as it finalises timing and advisory bank selection. Founded in 2022 by Ebrahim Al-Jassim (the former HungerStation CEO), Ninja generated approximately $1 billion in revenue in 2025 and is targeting $1.6 billion in 2026. The company raised $250 million last year led by Riyad Capital at a $1.5 billion valuation.

💰 Jeff Bezos is in early talks to raise $100B for a manufacturing automation fund, having traveled to the Middle East to pitch sovereign wealth funds directly, per the Wall Street Journal. The fund would acquire companies in chipmaking, defence, aerospace, and automotive, then deploy AI from Project Prometheus, a startup Bezos co-founded in late 2025 where he now serves as co-CEO. If it closes at that scale, it would rival SoftBank's Vision Fund as the largest private investment vehicle ever assembled – and like the Vision Fund before it, its viability would depend heavily on Gulf sovereign capital. Bezos joins a queue of Silicon Valley founders who've made the trip in the past 18 months: Sam Altman for OpenAI's $50 billion+ round, Dario Amodei for Anthropic's $13 billion Series F (QIA participated), and Elon Musk for xAI.

🩻 UAE-based Crescent Enterprises has co-led a $30 million Series C for XCath, the Texas-based surgical robotics company developing systems for stroke treatment and brain aneurysm procedures. The round brings total funding to $92 million. XCath completed its first robotic-assisted intracranial neurovascular intervention in November 2025 – only the second time such a procedure has been performed robotically.

🤖 Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani, former Qatari PM, has joined Amazon in a $1.2B round for Neura Robotics, the German AI robotics startup building humanoid robots for industrial and household automation, and now valued at approximately $4.62 billion. Sheikh Hamad invested via Prime Capital, his Luxembourg-based vehicle now managed by his son. The round also included Qualcomm Ventures, Tether, Bosch, and Schaeffler.