Happy Friday, friends 👋

Although needless to say, we’ve had happier ones.

First and foremost, we hope each and every one of you and your families are keeping well and safe amid what has been an exceedingly difficult week.

Ecosystem announcements have, very understandably, ground to a halt for the most part, but anything that has come through we cover below.

We're also bringing you a special deep dive this week. We spoke to Mark Chahwan, Co-founder and Group CEO of Sarwa, and Omair Ansari, Co-founder and CEO of Abhi, about the AWS outage that took a significant chunk of UAE fintech offline at the beginning of this week.

What actually went down, how they navigated the crisis from inside the building, how they got their platforms back online, and how they're preparing for future disruption off the back of it.

Plenty of learnings for all of us in that piece, we think. You can read it here.

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

This week’s round-up is a 5 min read:

Drone strikes knocked out two of AWS's three UAE data centres, taking dozens of fintech platforms offline.

FWDstart spoke to the leaders of two of the fintechs caught in the middle of it, Mark Chahwan, Co-founder and Group CEO of Sarwa, and Omair Ansari, Co-founder and CEO of Abhi, to understand what the crisis actually looked like from inside the building, how they got their platforms back online, and what it all means for the way the UAE's tech sector is thinking about infrastructure going forward.

We also spoke to Anas Abdullah of MilkStraw, a UAE startup that helps companies optimise their AWS bills, on what the outage has laid bare about the region's cloud infrastructure.

TruDoc Healthcare (🇦🇪 UAE), a virtual-first healthcare platform offering 24/7 telemedicine, chronic disease management, and hospital-grade home diagnostics, has raised $15M in a Pre-Series B round, with participation from the Al Nahyan family, the Al-Ketbi family, and existing investor Pulsar Capital.

Rimal Semiconductors (🇸🇦 KSA), a fabless semiconductor company designing high-performance power chips for energy, mobility, and industrial applications with Saudi-owned IP manufactured across foundries in Taiwan, Korea, and China, has raised an undisclosed bridge round, backed by Keheilan.

Skipr (🇦🇪 UAE), a sovereign AI infrastructure platform enabling secure AI-to-AI communication across clouds and borders through cryptographic identity, policy-driven routing, and auditable interoperability, has raised $2M in a Seed round at a $10M valuation, from undisclosed investors, operating out of Hub71 in Abu Dhabi.

Rewa (🇦🇪 UAE), a digital rent payment and rewards platform letting tenants pay by card or bank transfer while streamlining collections for landlords, has raised an undisclosed Seed round, backed by Qatar Development Bank, Plug and Play, Neocity Invest, Startup Wise Guys, and Second Century Ventures (REACH MENA).

iQtech (🇶🇦 Qatar), a medical simulation company developing EsculapioVR, an AI-powered VR platform for clinical training and performance assessment, incubated at Qatar Science and Technology Park, has raised an undisclosed round, with participation from Selexi and Uniero.

🇮🇳 Stride Ventures became the first Indian-headquartered fund backed by PIF, with Saudi's Jada Fund of Funds committing to the venture debt platform as part of a plan to deploy approximately $200 million in the Kingdom's innovation economy over the next two years. Founded in 2019, Stride has deployed over $1.6 billion in credit globally (including 20 unicorns) and has been building Gulf momentum – partnering with SAB Invest to provide Shariah-compliant financing, leading a $33 million debt facility for erad, and providing $30 million in growth debt to BRKZ. Jada, launched in 2018 with ~$1 billion from PIF, has deployed close to $600 million across nearly 50 funds and is increasingly allocating to private credit.

💡 QIA has joined a $500M Series E for Ayar Labs, the co-packaged optics (CPO) company solving AI infrastructure's interconnect bottleneck by replacing bandwidth-limited copper with optical connectivity. The round, led by Neuberger Berman, values the company at $3.75B and brings total funding to $870 million. QIA joins ARK Invest, Insight Partners, Sequoia Global Equities, and 1789 Capital as new investors alongside strategic backers AMD, Nvidia, MediaTek, and Alchip. Ayar Labs will use the capital to scale high-volume production, expand its Taiwan operations, and accelerate deployment of its TeraPHY optical engines for next-gen AI scale-up.

🤖 Singapore-based Dyna.Ai raised an eight-figure Series A led by Lion X Ventures to scale its agentic AI solutions for financial services and enterprise clients. The round included participation from Taiwan-listed ADATA and a Korean financial institution. Founded in 2024, Dyna.Ai takes a "Results-as-a-Service" approach deploying AI agents in regulated environments, with clients including global and regional banks across Asia, the Americas, and the Middle East. The company operates from Riyadh, Dubai, and Singapore.

💴 ADIA and Qatar Holding are cornerstoning PayPay's $1.1 billion Nasdaq IPO, committing up to $220 million alongside Visa for shares in the Japanese digital payments provider. SoftBank Vision Fund II is offloading 23.9 million shares while PayPay sells 31.1 million depositary shares, with pricing expected between $17-20 on March 11. PayPay reported profit of $656 million in the first nine months of 2025, up 255% YoY. The IPO was delayed amid Middle East conflict uncertainty, per Bloomberg. ADIA has been active on the IPO circuit recently, cornerstoning Indian renewables firm Clean Max and Chinese AI startup MiniMax, whose shares doubled on its Hong Kong debut.

🏦 The UAE Central Bank has granted emergency waivers allowing banks to use overseas data centres after drone attacks on local facilities caused widespread disruption to banking and ecommerce apps, per The Banker. The move is a rare relaxation of the UAE's stringent data residency rules – banks have received short-term NOCs to shift data abroad, similar to waivers granted during Covid in 2020. First Abu Dhabi Bank, the country's largest lender, remains severely disrupted. The waivers come just days after CBUAE launched a dedicated sovereign financial cloud for local institutions.