Happy Friday friends 👋

If there's a phrase that sums up board attitudes to headcount across MENA's food delivery and quick commerce sector right now, it's one borrowed from the sitting US president’s reality TV days: “you're fired”.

This week's contribution comes courtesy of Noon chairman Mohamed Alabbar, who, speaking at the Belgrade Business Summit last week, let slip the ambition to cut headcount by half, telling the audience that “Noon will go down 50% in staff in three months” before ending on the uplifting note that "in general, there is no need for people anymore."

Elsewhere on the food delivery beat, Uber has more than doubled its stake in Delivery Hero to roughly 19.5%, becoming the largest shareholder in the parent of Talabat and HungerStation, six years after exiting direct food delivery in MENA entirely. That, combined with CEO Östberg's confirmed departure under activist pressure, makes for a very interesting few months ahead.

Elsewhere, UAE-founded, MEVP and BECO Capital-backed Fresha has reached unicorn status with an $80 million investment from KKR, JCIF has launched Manara Ventures a $70 million growth fund for Jordanian tech startups backed by Abu Dhabi's Lunate, RemotePass has raised a $17.4 million Series B led by EBRD, and MGX has joined a $2.1 billion Series B for Alphabet's AI drug discovery spinout Isomorphic Labs, its first bet outside pure foundation model labs.

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This week’s round-up is a 5 min read:

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Fresha (🇦🇪 UAE / 🇬🇧 UK), a UAE-founded beauty and wellness booking and business management platform (now London-HQ’d) serving over 130k businesses across 120 countries with $15B in annual GMV, has raised $80M from KKR's Next Generation Technology Growth fund at a valuation exceeding $1B, reaching unicorn status.

Arib (🇸🇦 KSA), a digital financing marketplace connecting users with banks and licensed lenders through a single platform, has raised $23.5M in a funding round led by Merak Capital, with the round also including Sharia-compliant Murabaha financing facilities.

RemotePass (🇦🇪 UAE), a global employment and payroll platform enabling businesses to onboard, manage, and pay workers, has raised $17.4M in a Series B round led by EBRD Venture Capital, with participation from 500 Global and existing investors Oraseya Capital, 212 VC, Access Bridge Ventures, and Khwarizmi Ventures.

ARRW (🇪🇬 Egypt), Egypt's first homegrown licensed ride-hailing platform, which the company says serves more than 200K users, has secured a $4M investment from Tasheed Egypt.

Peekabox (🇦🇪 UAE), a Dubai-based surplus food marketplace connecting consumers with unsold inventory from restaurants, cafes, and grocery stores has closed an oversubscribed $1.5M angel-backed Seed round.

🇯🇴 JCIF has launched Manara Ventures, a $70M growth fund for Jordanian tech startups, backed by Abu Dhabi's Lunate. The fund will invest $750K-$3M in 20+ growth-stage Jordanian companies, with additional capital reserved for regional expansion. Luma Fawaz, formerly CEO of Oasis500, has been appointed as CEO. The launch marks JCIF's first move into venture capital after deploying JOD 100M+ across six Jordanian companies since 2023. Jordan has long produced tech companies disproportionate to its domestic market (Maktoob, OpenSooq, Tarjama, Tamatem) but growth capital within the Kingdom has remained scarce.

💰 SAB has invested in STV's Emerging Tech & AI Fund, adding to the tens of millions in commitments the vehicle says it has secured since launching with Google as first backer in May 2025. The fund has announced four investments to date: Sawt (Arabic-native AI voice agents), Clarity (agentic AI customer analytics), Signit (AI legal), and Stream (billing and payments infrastructure). SAB previously partnered with STV on its $100M non-dilutive NICE Fund through SAB Invest last year.

🇸🇦 BECO Capital has opened a Riyadh office, with KSA Partner Rakan AlRashed leading alongside Mokhtar Ibrahim and Saja Alidriss. AlRashed joined BECO earlier this year from Access Bridge Ventures, the seed fund he co-founded in 2020. The Dubai-based firm, which manages over $820M across early and growth-stage funds, led Saudi-based Stream's $5.2M seed extension last week. The office formalises a long-standing Saudi presence and comes after Managing Partner Yousef Hammad departed in April following 11 years at the firm.

🔄 Key Capital, the region's first dedicated VC secondaries fund manager, has partnered with DFM-listed SHUAA Capital as it approaches first close on a $50M fund. Key Fund I LP buys stakes in tech companies through off-cap-table transactions and has closed two deals so far. SHUAA will advise on capital formation and LP relationships. Key Capital, led by Basil Moftah and Leena Khalil, estimates the regional secondaries market at $1B+.

🤖 Noon chairman Mohamed Alabbar has said the e-commerce platform will cut its headcount by 50% over the next three months, attributing the reduction to AI. "I don't want anybody to tell this but Noon will go down 50% in staff in three months," Alabbar said at the Belgrade Business Summit, aired on Euronews Serbia. The remarks echo an ambition he outlined to the FT last September to halve Noon's 40,000-strong driver workforce by 2027 through autonomous vehicles. Noon has not formally announced any restructuring, and the figure has not been confirmed by the company.

🍔 Uber has more than doubled its stake in Delivery Hero, parent of talabat and HungerStation from roughly 7% to about 19.5%, becoming the largest shareholder in the Berlin-listed food delivery group, Reuters has reported. The stake is worth around €1.7 billion at current prices, and Uber also holds options for a further 5.6% of the shares, which would give it a blocking minority. The company said in a regulatory filing that it does not currently intend to raise its stake above 30%, the threshold that would trigger a mandatory offer to the rest of the register. Uber itself exited direct food delivery in MENA in May 2020, when it shuttered Uber Eats across Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE and folded the regional operations into Careem. The move lands six days after CEO Niklas Östberg confirmed he would step down by March 2027 following pressure from activist Aspex.

🧬 Abu Dhabi's MGX has joined a $2.1 billion Series B for UK drug-discovery firm Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet's AI-for-medicine spinout from DeepMind, in a round led by Joshua Kushner's Thrive Capital and joined by existing backers Alphabet and Google Ventures alongside new investors Temasek, CapitalG and the UK Sovereign AI Fund. The capital is earmarked for global expansion, hiring and continued development of Isomorphic's AI drug design engine. The deal is MGX's fourth direct position in a frontier AI lab in 18 months, after OpenAI, xAI and Anthropic, and its first outside foundation models, suggesting the Abu Dhabi vehicle is beginning to diversify away from pure model labs into applied AI. It also extends a co-investing pattern with Thrive, which led the $10 billion Databricks Series J that MGX participated in late 2024.

🏗️ HUMAIN has selected Goldman Sachs to arrange at least SAR 20B ($5.33B) in financing for data centre development in Saudi Arabia, Reuters reported citing sources. The PIF-owned AI company is building GPU computing infrastructure with capacity up to two gigawatts, roughly one-third of its 2034 target. The data centres are planned for the Riyadh region. HUMAIN, established last year, has signed partnerships with xAI and Blackstone-backed AirTrunk.

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