Happy Friday friends 👋

First off, a massive thanks for the response to this week's deep dive where we broke down Tabby's first publicly published audited full-year results for its Saudi subsidiary. If you're still interested in accessing the analysis, here's 50% off your first month as a premium subscriber.

Now, where were we. Ah yes, LATAM neobank juggernaut Nubank has long been rumoured to have the UAE on its roadmap, but up until recently there wasn't a whole pile of substance to the whisperings. That changed this week, with snapshots of CEO David Vélez and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled confirming that Latin America's largest digital bank is setting up a new HQ at ADGM. With Revolut building its UAE presence out of Dubai at the same time, both of the world's largest neobanks are arriving simultaneously but choosing different emirates (and perhaps different licensing strategies).

Elsewhere, court filings have revealed that Abu Dhabi's Lunate owns a stake in $90 billion venture firm Insight Partners, Kingdom Holding has picked up Prince Alwaleed's stake in Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures at a 30% discount, and PIF has dismissed Alat CEO Amit Midha and pulled back on semiconductor manufacturing ambitions as part of a wider spending review.

We've also got Egypt's Lucky raising a $23 million Series B, Falak Startups exiting Delta Oil at a 25.5x return, and Algerian founder Ines Boutemadja becoming the first Algerian woman in Y Combinator with AI insurance startup Klaimee.

This and much more below 👇

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Lucky (🇪🇬 Egypt), a consumer credit platform offering cashback, instalments, and flexible financing, has raised $23M in a Series B round (equity and debt), with participation from Disruptech Ventures, DPI via Nclude, Suez Canal Bank, and OneStop, to expand into North Africa and build toward a neo-banking platform.

Jozo (🇸🇦 KSA), a real estate tokenisation platform enabling fractional digital ownership of property assets, having previously issued Saudi Arabia's first private-sector tokenized real estate deed, has raised $2.21M in a Seed round, led by Sheikh Hamad Bin Saidan as a strategic partner.

ZSystems (🇲🇦 Morocco), a B2B2C digital marketplace connecting brands, wholesalers, and retailers, has raised $1.65M in a Seed round, led by Azur Innovation Management, with follow-on from MNF Ventures and Witamax and new backing from Harambeans Prosperity Fund, bringing total funding to $2.7M.

Maison Safqa (🇸🇦 KSA), a flash-sale platform enabling premium and luxury brands to monetise excess inventory through time-limited campaigns across fashion, beauty, and lifestyle, has raised $620K in a pre-Seed round, backed by 500 Global via the Sanabil MENA 500 accelerator and regional and international angels.

ElGoat (🇸🇦 KSA), a free-to-play skill-based football prediction platform where users predict match outcomes and goal scorers across competitions including the Premier League and Saudi Roshn League, has raised $266K in a Seed round via Trigon, at a $2.66M valuation.

🏦 Abu Dhabi's Lunate acquired a passive minority stake in Insight Partners' management company, court filings revealed via Forbes, giving it exposure to the $90B venture firm's management fee revenue and carried interest across its entire portfolio. The rumoured sub-2% stake, acquired in January 2025, emerged through legal proceedings rather than voluntary disclosure. Lunate, which manages over $115B under entities controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, is also an LP in multiple Insight funds. Insight has backed Wiz, Databricks, Anthropic, and most recently participated in OpenAI's $122B round.

🏢 Kingdom Holding has acquired Prince Alwaleed bin Talal's stake in Breakthrough Energy Ventures for $68M, roughly 30% below its most recent audited fair value of $98M. The related-party transaction transfers an investment Prince Alwaleed made personally in December 2016, when he committed $50M to the Bill Gates-founded clean energy fund. The relationship between the two stretches back decades – they were co-owners of Four Seasons from 1997 until Cascade acquired a further 23.75% from Kingdom Holding in 2021. BEV's portfolio includes a regional connection, as an investor in Oman-based carbon mineralisation startup 44.01, which raised a $37M Series A led by Equinor Ventures and Shorooq in July 2024.

🇪🇬 Falak Startups has exited Delta Oil at a 25.5x return (in EGP terms), with the stake acquired by Den VC, a US-based firm operating in emerging markets including Africa and the Arab region. Founded in 2018 by Serag Moussa and Karim Salah, Delta Oil collects used cooking oil from households and F&B businesses across 5+ Egyptian cities and hundreds of villages, employing 650+ collectors from vulnerable communities. The company has supplied over 720,000 kg of waste oil to European biodiesel refineries including Neste, TotalEnergies, and Eni.

🏦 Nubank will establish a new HQ at ADGM, following a meeting between Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled and founder David Vélez. The NYSE-listed neobank, the world's largest by customer count with over 100M customers, serves Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay, the US, and Germany, with a market cap of approximately $70B. The ADGM base will be set up in collaboration with Abu Dhabi institutions including Wio Bank, suggesting a partnership model rather than standalone licensing. The move comes as Nubank expands aggressively – the US OCC conditionally approved a national bank charter in January 2026. Notably, Revolut is building its UAE presence out of Dubai, meaning the two largest global neobanks are arriving simultaneously but choosing different emirates.

🇩🇿 Algerian founder Ines Boutemadja has become the first Algerian woman in Y Combinator with Klaimee, a San Francisco-based startup building insurance and certification infrastructure for autonomous AI agents. Co-founded with her husband Julien Catonnet in March 2026, Klaimee audits AI agents' architecture and failure modes, then backs them with AI-specific liability coverage through a self-service platform aimed at startups deploying agents to enterprise clients. Boutemadja previously spent five years as GM of Nomad Insurance at SafetyWing (YC W18). She's the third Algerian-heritage founder through YC after Yassir founder Noureddine Tayebi and Elevate co-founder Youcef Oudjidane.

🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia's PIF has dismissed Alat CEO Amit Midha and dropped plans to invest in semiconductor production, per Semafor. Midha, a former Dell executive hired three years ago to run the $100B electronics fund, was removed earlier this year amid a wider spending review. A team focused on semiconductors has been reassigned, with resources shifting to support the Kingdom's data centre ambitions instead. Several attempts to invest in chipmakers and secure agreements for Saudi fab plants failed due to competition from Asia, Europe, and the US. Dr. Muhammad Nasser Aldawood, head of industrials and mining at PIF, has been named acting CEO. Alat's other electronics manufacturing projects continue, including its $2B Lenovo investment.

🛢️ Aramco Ventures has participated in a $36M round for Via Separations, the US deeptech startup replacing heat-based industrial separation with membrane filtration that cuts energy use by up to 90%. Climate Investment and Marathon Petroleum also joined. The company has nearly two years of commercial operation at a Canadian pulp mill and completed a Gulf Coast refinery pilot last year.

🤖 Aramco's Prosperity7 Ventures has participated in a $19.3M round for NeuBird AI, a SV-based startup building agentic AI for production operations. The round was led by Xora Innovation with participation from Mayfield, StepStone, and M12 (Microsoft's venture fund). NeuBird's production ops agent automates incident resolution for DevOps and SRE teams.

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