Happy Friday friends 👋

We had a really enjoyable conversation this week with Bilal Abu-Ghazaleh, the founder of 1001, which has just raised a $30 million Series A led by Lux Capital to build sovereign AI for the Gulf's critical infrastructure, barely eight months after its $9 million seed. Born in Amman, Abu-Ghazaleh spent close to a decade in the US, rising to director of generative AI operations at Scale AI before leaving to build frontier AI for the GCC after Meta's investment shifted Scale's direction.

The round saw PIF-owned Sanabil, 9Yards, and Hanabi join the cap table, with existing backers General Catalyst, CIV, and Stanford AI researcher Chris Ré all increasing their commitments, and the angel roster reads like a MENA diaspora power list, with Replit's Amjad Masad, Ramp's Karim Atiyeh, and Clay's Kareem Amin all involved.

In our conversation, we went deeper on the business model and operations of the company, the double meaning behind the name (a nod to One Thousand and One Nights, and for the engineers, the binary reading of 1001), and the deeper resonance of the company's mission, summed up best in Bilal's own words: to "find people who, like me, are from the region, worked or studied abroad and wanna move back, and don't want it to feel like a compromise."

Elsewhere, Tabby has secured consumer and SME finance licences from SAMA, opening up larger purchases and working capital lending, OSN has proposed taking Anghami private two years after buying control, and Catalyst Fund has reached $30 million in commitments for its debut pan-African climate fund, whose portfolio already includes Egypt's Bekia, NoorNation, and VAIS alongside Morocco's Sand to Green

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This week’s round-up is a 5 min read:

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1001 (🇦🇪 UAE), a company building sovereign AI systems for critical infrastructure, has raised $30M in a Series A, led by Lux Capital, with new backing from PIF-owned Sanabil Investments, 9Yards, and Hanabi, plus increased commitments from General Catalyst, CIV, and Stanford AI researcher Chris Ré.

Maalexi (🇦🇪 UAE), an agri-fintech building MAATEX, a regulated real-world-asset exchange for verifying and trading agricultural commodities, has raised $2.8M in an oversubscribed round, led by Tawuniya, with participation from Global Ventures, its existing pre-Series A lead.

ariika (🇪🇬 Egypt), a digital-first, D2C home furnishing and décor brand which partners with global artisans and manufactures its own furniture, has received follow-on investment from Beltone VC as part of its Saudi expansion.

Lychee (🇪🇬 Egypt), a healthy F&B brand combining retail food outlets with its own manufacturing arm, has received follow-on investment from Beltone VC as part of its Saudi expansion.

BrainsMingle (🇪🇬 Egypt), an AI-driven, video-first professional networking platform where experts host live sessions and build communities, has raised $400K in a strategic Seed round from BasharSoft Group (owner of WUZZUF and Forasna), marking the group's first investment since acquiring iCareer in October 2025.

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🎵 OSN Streaming has proposed taking Anghami private at $3.39 per share, a price that would value the remaining 33% float at just over $10M. The offer represents the stock's three-month volume-weighted average rather than a premium, and OSN told the board it has no intention of selling its stake to a third party, effectively ruling out a rival bid. Anghami listed on Nasdaq via SPAC at a $220M valuation in 2022, before a steady decline forced a 1-for-10 reverse split last year. The board has formed a special committee of three independent directors to evaluate the proposal. Anghami reported $99.3M in 2025 revenue, up 27%, but remains unprofitable.

🐝 Beehive has acquired a majority stake in Themar, the SAMA-regulated Saudi debt crowdfunding platform, becoming the first digital SME financing platform regulated across the UAE, Oman and Saudi Arabia. Themar, co-founded by Yousef Al Dabbagh, received its SAMA licence in August 2023 as the Kingdom's seventh authorised debt crowdfunding platform and offers Sharia-compliant purchase financing for SMEs; the deal was first signalled through a non-binding offer letter last September. Beehive, founded in Dubai in 2014 as MENA's first DFSA-regulated P2P lending platform and majority-owned by e& enterprise since 2023, has operated in Saudi since 2020 through banking partnerships. The company is also looking to replicate its Goldman Sachs and Magellan Capital structured funding facility in the Kingdom. Terms were not disclosed.

🌍 Catalyst Fund has reached $30M in commitments for its debut pan-African climate fund, with backing from IFC, FASA, Shell Foundation, Trafigura Foundation, Speedinvest and Blink Impact. The fund, led by Maelis Carraro, Maxime Bayen, Olúwatóyìn Emmanuel-Olubake and Amolo Ng'weno, invests pre-seed to Series A in climate resilience startups across agriculture, energy, water and mobility. The 28-company portfolio includes Egypt's Bekia, NoorNation and VAIS, alongside Morocco's Sand to Green, which converts desert into farmland using agroforestry and solar-powered desalination. Final close expected later this year.

🏛️ Ruya Partners has provided a $15M private credit facility to Whiteshield, and AI policy intelligence company that builds platforms for governments and multilateral institutions. The deal is the seventh from the ADGM-based firm's flagship private credit fund, which is backed by sovereign and sovereign-linked investors across the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and its first in what it calls the sovereign intelligence category.

💳 Tabby has secured consumer and SME finance licences from SAMA, allowing it to offer instalment plans of up to SAR 50,000 over 12 months alongside its four-payment product and extend working capital to retailers. The longer Murabaha-structured plans are live at Noon, IKEA, Almosafer and flynas among others, opening up higher-value categories including education, travel, used cars and short-term rentals. The licences build on Tabby's 2025 BNPL licence and match what KSA general manager Abdulaziz Saja told FWDstart earlier this year, that high-ticket verticals and offline retail would be a 2026 focus. Tabby, MENA's most valuable fintech at $4.5B, serves more than 25 million users across Saudi, the UAE and Kuwait.

🛢️ Aramco Ventures has led Together AI's $800M Series C at an $8.3B valuation, backing the AI neocloud that rents out Nvidia GPU clusters and AI infrastructure. Together AI claims annual bookings of over $1.15B as companies increasingly adopt open source models rather than pay premiums for closed frontier systems. Other investors include Vista Equity Partners, General Catalyst, Nvidia and Emergence Capital. The company last raised a $305M Series B at a $3.3B valuation 16 months ago.

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