Happy Friday, friends 👋

With all eyes on Washington this week for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's state visit, this edition is naturally dominated by the major tech announcements that accompanied the trip.

We may soon need to afford Saudi’s state-backed AI behemoth, HUMAIN, its own category on the site given the volume and velocity of announcements we've covered over the past few months. This week’s headline grabber being confirmation of the rumoured team-up between Elon Musk's xAI and HUMAIN to build a data centre in the Kingdom, confirmed at 500 megawatts and powered by NVIDIA chips.

In an unintended slip, Musk briefly misstated the figure as 500 gigawatts before correcting himself and joking that such an endeavour would cost "eight bazillion trillion dollars." A facetious jest, but one that will likely do little to quell skeptics regarding the gargantuan figures being committed to data infrastructure by hyperscalers, and the perceived "House of Cards" loop these are built on.

HUMAIN is also putting its venture war chest to work, leading Luma's $900M Series C.

Closer to home, we saw a range of funding announcements this week across the gamut of industries, from staple proptech and fintech to cybersecurity SaaS and healthcare.

The pick of the bunch for our money is Kingpin, who have raised $3.5M in Seed funding to digitise the archaic workflows of B2B retail distribution. Noteworthily, they’ve drawn support from a slew of US investors including Infinity Ventures, Red Swan Ventures, and Mu Ventures, alongside regional first believers COTU. A further harbinger of regional companies actively building for a global audience.

This and much more below 👇

This week’s round-up is a 5 min read:

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Ghanem (🇸🇦 KSA), a proptech startup enabling fractional real estate investment through a low-entry digital model, has raised $7.1M from Al-Romaih Group to advance its technology stack and expand market access in alignment with Vision 2030.

Secure.com (🇦🇪 UAE), an AI-native cybersecurity startup behind Digital Security Teammates, has raised $4.5M Seed from Disrupt.com to launch its AI agents globally and help security teams automate alert management.

Kingpin (🇦🇪 UAE), an AI-native SaaS startup digitising global wholesale by unifying discovery, sales and fulfilment, has raised $3.5M Seed backed by Infinity Ventures, Red Swan Ventures and Mu Ventures, alongside UAE-based COTU and Outliers, with support from Hub71, to expand engineering, deepen AI capabilities and scale into Europe and North America.

Nabta Health (🇦🇪 UAE), an AI-powered women’s health platform combining digital care and diagnostics, has raised $2M pre-Series A, bringing total funding to $4.5M, to scale regionally and strengthen clinical infrastructure via hospital partnerships.

Takadao (🇸🇦 KSA), a Shariah-compliant Web3 fintech offering savings, loans and cooperative life insurance, has raised $1.5M Seed led by Hasan VC, Syla Invest, Wahed Ventures and others, bringing total funding to $3.1M to support expansion across global markets.

SahmAlgo (🇸🇦 KSA), an AI-powered financial analytics platform, has raised $1M Seed led by Gharesah Investment to expand proprietary algorithms and enrich market intelligence capabilities.

Shatib (🇸🇦 KSA), a B2B contech marketplace for group procurement of materials, has raised $750K pre-Seed from a strategic angel investor to improve procurement efficiency and enhance cost optimisation for developers and contractors.

🤖 Elon Musk announced that xAI will build a 500 MW data centre in Saudi Arabia with PIF-backed HUMAIN AI, powered by Nvidia chips, exceeding the 300 MW capacity of its current Colossus 1 facility. The announcement followed a US–Saudi AI MoU and coincided with Nvidia confirming AWS will build a 100 MW GPU hub with “gigawatt ambition.” Musk briefly misstated the figure as 500 gigawatts before correcting himself, joking it would cost “8 bazillion trillion dollars.” Musk also forecast wider adoption of humanoid robots and suggested solar-powered AI satellites could become the cheapest compute option within five years.

🧠 Adobe has partnered with HUMAIN to develop culturally aligned generative AI models for the Middle East, integrating HUMAIN’s Arabic-first LLM ALLAM into Adobe’s core platforms. HUMAIN will serve as Firefly Foundry’s technology partner, enabling custom enterprise model training, with Adobe also becoming HUMAIN’s first global AI data centre customer. Qualcomm will supply inference hardware. The initiative targets over 400 million Arabic speakers and marks the first major push to build locally trained, culturally grounded generative AI at enterprise scale.

🛰️ HUMAIN, backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, has led Luma AI’s $900M Series C (via SAFEs and two tranches) to accelerate multimodal AGI development. Luma builds “World Models” i.e. AI systems that simulate physical environments using visual, audio and language data, enabling real-world interaction beyond text. Other investors include AMD, Amazon, Andreessen Horowitz, Amplify Partners and Matrix Partners. Luma will be a core customer of Project Halo, HUMAIN’s planned 2 GW AI compute supercluster in Saudi Arabia built for peta-scale training. Its flagship model Ray3, already deployed commercially via Adobe, will now power expansion into simulation, design and robotics, alongside participation in HUMAIN Create to build Arabic-aligned AI systems.

⚡ QIA has invested in d-Matrix, valuing the AI inference specialist at $2B and bringing total funding to $450M. The oversubscribed round was co-led by Bullhound Capital, Triatomic Capital and Temasek, with participation from QIA, EDBI, Microsoft’s M12, Mirae Asset, Industry Ventures and Nautilus Venture Partners. d-Matrix develops a full-stack data centre inference platform delivering 10× faster performance, 3× lower cost and up to 5× better energy efficiency than GPU-based systems, enabling one data centre to operate like ten.

📈 Rasan secured initial approval from SAMA to establish Next Fin Solutions Co., a wholly owned digital finance brokerage focused on expanding the company’s footprint into fintech services beyond insurtech. The move comes as Rasan posted Q3 2025 profits of SAR 82.3M (+125% YoY) and shares hit an all-time high of SAR 111, reflecting a 50% increase over the past year. Since listing 509 days ago, the company has added over SAR 9M in market value per day, making it one of Saudi Arabia’s strongest-performing tech stocks.

📊 MAGNiTT reports that Series A valuations in emerging markets have sharply diverged, with the Middle East now leading. In H1 2025, the UAE hit a mean valuation of $123M (over 2× YoY), while Saudi Arabia reached $76M. Since 2021, regional Series A growth has been almost twice as fast as Southeast Asia. More here.