Happy Friday friends 👋

We come bearing a scoop! If you didn’t catch our emergency edition earlier this week, Careem’s first public P&L, buried in newly disclosed e& figures, shows that Careem Technologies lost $122 million at the operating level in the first half of 2026 on $241 million in revenue, or roughly $20 million a month. The half-year numbers also conceal a sharp second-quarter slowdown, with revenue growth falling from 37.5% in Q1 to just 5% in Q2 as the company wound down Saudi consumer services and cut staff across markets.

Staying on mobility, Nigeria-born Moove has raised a $250 million Series C at a $2.1 billion valuation led by Abu Dhabi's Mubadala, as the Dubai headquartered vehicle financing company builds out what it calls the depot layer for robotaxis, servicing autonomous fleets for partners including the likes of Waymo (with Uber, notably, also on the cap table).

We also finally published our long-in-the-works deep dive on Travis Kalanick’s Gulf food empire, now called NAMAA. It starts with the stealthy KitchenPark operation he spent years building largely out of sight, follows it through the cloud-kitchen bust and a huge Gulf expansion, then into an attempted $2 billion dual Abu Dhabi-Riyadh IPO and, eventually, the $1.7 billion a16z-backed Atoms comeback now sitting above it all. Read all about what Travis has been cooking in forensic depth here.

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This and much more below 👇

This week’s round-up is a 5 min read:

Independent reporting, deep dives and analysis on the companies, investors and markets shaping technology across the Middle East and North Africa.

Moove (🇦🇪 UAE / 🇳🇬 Nigeria), a vehicle financing and fleet operations company that builds robotics-first depots servicing autonomous fleets for partners including Waymo, has raised $250M in a Series C at a $2.1B valuation, led by Mubadala, co-led by Woven Capital and Ion Pacific, with BlueCrest, Sona Capital, Uber, BlackRock, MUFG, Franklin Templeton, Left Lane, and the Ontario Power Generation Pension Plan also participating.

Longevium (🇦🇪 UAE), a longevity healthcare company running three Dubai clinics and building an AI research lab at Dubai Science Park focused on biological age measurement and preventive diagnostics, says it has raised $7M in its first round from undisclosed investors.

Rime (🇸🇦 KSA), a physical AI platform linking 6,000+ cameras to AI agents across 2,000 retail and service sites, processing decisions on-site through edge computing rather than remote data centres, has raised $2M+ in a Seed round, led by SEEDRA Ventures, with participation from Athlah Investment, Unity Invest Partners, and angels.

Soter Insure (🇦🇪 UAE), an insuretech offering digital asset coverage including D&O, crime, specie, slashing, and smart contract failure, denominated in both fiat and crypto, has closed the first tranche of a Series B, led by Galaxy Digital, with new participation from Coinbase Ventures and Franklin Templeton and follow-on from Brevan Howard Digital.

MOZN (🇸🇦 KSA), an enterprise AI company serving 150+ financial services and public sector customers across financial crime prevention and knowledge intelligence, has received an undisclosed strategic investment from HUMAIN, the PIF-owned AI company, alongside a co-development partnership.

📱 SCOOP: Careem's first public P&L reveals widening losses as growth slows sharply. Newly disclosed e& figures show Careem Technologies lost $122M at the operating level in the first half of 2026 on $241M in revenue, up 20% year on year, roughly $20M a month. The half-year numbers mask a steep second-quarter slowdown, with revenue growth collapsing from 37.5% in Q1 to just 5% in Q2 as the company wound down Saudi consumer services and cut staff across markets. The $100M Uber paid e& for 12.5% implies an equity valuation of about $800M, almost exactly what e& paid for control in 2023, meaning the Everything App returns to Uber at essentially the same price after three years, still growing, still heavily loss-making.

💳 Tamara has been assigned an A- investment-grade credit rating with a Stable outlook from Tassnief, the Saudi rating agency, marking the BNPL company's first official credit rating. The rating is effectively Tamara's entry ticket to the Kingdom's debt capital markets, opening the door to riyal-denominated sukuk issuance to institutional investors who require rated paper, and diversifying a funding base currently anchored by the Goldman Sachs, Citi and Apollo facility upsized to SAR 5.8B. Tassnief cited strong asset quality, improving profitability and risk management. Tamara serves more than 25 million customers and 130,000 merchants, and reported Q1 revenue up 210%.

💼 Pemo has launched a business account for UAE SMEs, issued by Islamic bank ruya, letting small businesses earn an expected profit rate of up to 3.75% on idle cash through a Wakala deposit with no minimum balance or lock-in. The account sits inside Pemo's spend management platform, which serves more than 6,000 UAE businesses and has raised over $19M. It’s the second ruya-powered business account to launch in two months, after rival spend management platform Alaan unveiled its own in June. Both companies were among the fintechs caught in Saudi Arabia's Neoleap BIN sponsorship suspension. Pemo also received in-principle SVF approval from the UAE central bank in July.

🌍 Flutterwave is reportedly lining up the acquisition of a bank in East Africa, CEO Olugbenga Agboola said, declining to name the institution or country, as the Nigerian payments company pursues an M&A-led push into banking. Egypt sits on the expansion priority list alongside Kenya, Ghana, Rwanda, Tanzania and South Africa, building on the PSP and payment facilitator licences Flutterwave has held in the country since 2023 as its North Africa beachhead. The company secured a Nigerian microfinance banking licence in April, acquired open banking startup Mono in January, and saw Ripple join its cap table in June at a $3.25B valuation. Agboola said an IPO will wait until the banking and remittance businesses reach scale.

💳 Indian payments technology company Mintoak has acquired Dubai-based ICC Loyalty, adding customer engagement and rewards services to its merchant-payments platform for banks. ICC Loyalty serves more than 30 banks and 11 million customers across 10+ countries, with clients including Emirates Islamic, Dubai Islamic Bank and RAKBANK. Mintoak, backed by PayPal Ventures, British International Investment and HDFC Bank, says the combined business generates $30M+ in annual revenue at a 30%+ margin and powers over $93B in annual payment volume. Terms were not disclosed.

🇶🇦 Qatar Development Bank has invested in Multiverse Computing's €500M Series C, which values the Spanish AI company at €1.5B, with Multiverse establishing its regional headquarters in Doha as part of the deal. The company compresses AI language models to cut energy consumption and computing costs, letting models run on standalone devices for greater sovereign control. The investment comes through the Startup Qatar programme, which has backed more than 40 startups from 15 countries since 2024 and is targeting a QAR 1B portfolio by 2030.

🛵 Dubai’s Al-Futtaim Group participated in Indian EV startup River Mobility's $120M Series C, joining Yamaha and Mitsui among existing investors in a round led by Elev8 Venture Partners and Claypond Capital. The Bengaluru-based company plans a new plant with capacity for 80,000 electric scooters a month, up from 10,000 currently, with revenue more than quadrupling in fiscal 2026. River Mobility competes with Ather, TVS and Bajaj in India's fastest-growing EV segment, which has been boosted this year by rising fuel prices from the Middle East war. The UAE conglomerate first invested in 2023.

🌾 Aramco Ventures has made its first investment in an Indian startup, leading Mitti Labs' $9.5M Series A, backing the climate tech company's AI platform for water-resilient rice farming. Founded in 2023, Mitti Labs uses satellite imagery and NASA-supported models to create digital twins of individual rice fields, helping farmers adopt irrigation practices that cut water use nearly 40% and methane emissions by more than 50%. Lightspeed India, Godrej Industries Group and Cisco Foundation also participated, bringing total funding to $12.5M as the company expands into the Philippines and Indonesia.

🪺 Beltone Venture Capital has partially exited Egyptian proptech platform BirdNest at a 3.5x return and 80% IRR over a two-year holding period, covering both its direct investment and its stake through a joint fund with UAE-based Citadel International Holdings. It follows the fund's Bosta exit at 75% IRR in May, which drove Beltone VC's most profitable quarter since inception, and takes the firm past five exits since its 2023 launch. BirdNest, which manages furnished and short-term rental properties on behalf of owners, says it’s grown USD revenue more than 10x over two years and reached profitability. Beltone retains a strategic stake; terms were not disclosed.

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