Happy Friday friends 👋

PayPal Ventures' $100 million commitment to the Middle East and Africa, announced with some fanfare in September last year, looks very much in doubt following the news that the corporate venture arm is being wound down as part of a broader restructuring under new CEO Enrique Lores. Their MENA portfolio includes BNPL unicorn Tabby and Egyptian payments processor Paymob. It's unclear exactly what happens to those positions now, though secondary sales through Jefferies are reportedly being explored.

Revolut, meanwhile, aren't having things entirely their own way regionally. Morocco's central bank governor has effectively put their entry into the country on ice, telling the fintech that local banks already cover the services it offers, a stark contrast to the successful regulatory path they just completed in the UAE last week.

A long-rumoured public market debut for Egyptian fintech super app MNT-Halan increasingly appears to be on the cards, with Bloomberg reporting the company is working with Citi and EFG Hermes on a Cairo IPO of its Egyptian business at up to $1 billion. Bear in mind, that would only constitute its Egyptian operations and not its wider geographical footprint, which now encompasses Turkey, the UAE, and Pakistan.

And in the "second acts" department, Oman's Phaze Ventures has backed Metal, the AI fundraising startup from Airlift founder Usman Gul. His previous company, the Pakistani grocery delivery startup, raised the country's largest ever round before collapsing in 2022.

As always, if you're enjoying the newsletter, please consider supporting our ability to grow by becoming a premium subscriber. And if you're interested in multi-seat access, just give us a shout.

This and much more below 👇

This week’s round-up is a 5 min read:

Weekly long-form analysis and insights, founder and VC playbooks, the Careem Mafia Database, the MENA Tech IPO Tracker, the Diaspora 50, and two years of archived deep-dives

Terraxy (🇸🇦 KSA), a KAUST spinout developing Carbosoil, a soil enhancer for arid environments that improves water and nutrient retention, has raised $3M in a Seed round, led by Wa'ed Ventures, with participation from KAUST.

Revora (🇦🇪 UAE), an AI commerce platform (formerly MyAlice) running sales agents across WhatsApp, Instagram and brand sites for ecommerce merchants, has raised $2M in a Seed round, co-led by i2i Ventures and Oraseya Capital, with participation from Anchorless Bangladesh, Conjunction Capital, F6 Ventures, Hi2 Global, Orbit Ventures, and angels including Salla co-founder Salman Butt.

Rentify (🇦🇪 UAE), a proptech automating rent collection, tenant onboarding, and lease management for landlords and property managers, has raised $2M in a Seed round from a syndicate of real estate and fintech investors.

Metal (🇦🇪 UAE), an AI platform helping founders manage venture fundraising, backed by YC and a16z Speedrun, has received a strategic investment from Phaze Ventures.

RoboCare (🇹🇳 Tunisia), a precision agriculture platform using AI and satellite/drone data for early crop disease detection, has raised a six-figure round from 216 Capital.

🇪🇬 MNT-Halan is considering a Cairo IPO of its Egyptian business at a $900M-$1B valuation, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The company is working with Citi and EFG Hermes on a potential listing that could come as soon as this year, with operations in Türkiye, the UAE and Pakistan kept outside the listed entity. MNT-Halan reached a $1.4B group valuation earlier this month in a round led by Al Ahly Capital. A listing would add to an Egyptian IPO pipeline that includes Bosta, which is lining up the country's first tech-logistics listing.

💳 Lean Technologies and Ziina have launched what they call the UAE's first one-tap Pay by Bank experience, announced at Lean's Dubai event on 18 June. The feature lets users connect a bank account once and make future wallet top-ups with a single tap under the Open Finance framework, built on Lean's Deposits product with 12-month account-on-file consent. The partnership produced the country's first customer-initiated Open Finance payment in January. Ziina, founded by Faisal, Sarah and Talal Toukan, serves more than 260,000 users and raised a $22M Series A led by Altos Ventures.

🇲🇦 Morocco's central bank has effectively paused Revolut's path to entering the country, with Governor Abdellatif Jouahri saying services the fintech offers are already available through local banks. Jouahri met Revolut's leadership in Rabat in early June but told them the regulator had more urgent priorities, citing upcoming World Bank/IMF evaluations and AML reviews. No new foreign banking licence has been issued in Morocco in over a decade. The setback contrasts with Revolut's progress in the UAE, where it completed licensing this month.

For Mohammad Al-Khalili, there's no bigger and more personal problem worth solving than debt collection, one of finance's most avoided corners, which his company ClearGrid came out of stealth with $10M to tackle in 2025.

Listen or watch now on
YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts

🍽️ Foodics has completed its full acquisition of Greek AI startup Norma, building on a minority stake acquired in Q1 2025. Norma's natural-language analytics and demand forecasting tools, which the company says can cut restaurant COGS by 5-10%, have been integrated into the Foodics platform across more than 10,000 customer branches. The Riyadh-based restaurant operations platform powers 40,000+ branches across the GCC and North Africa and raised a $170M Series C in 2022 led by Prosus and Sanabil. Terms were not disclosed.

💸 PayPal Ventures has paused new investments and is winding down operations, Fortune and TechCrunch reported, leaving in limbo a $100M commitment to Middle East and Africa startups announced just nine months ago. The pledge, made under former CEO Alex Chriss, was intended to scale up an existing portfolio that includes Tabby and Paymob. Chriss left in February and was replaced by HP veteran Enrique Lores, who arrived with a restructuring mandate. PayPal is reportedly exploring secondary sales of venture holdings through Jefferies.

📊 GCC private debt deployment reached $4.1B in 2025, up 8.2x from $500M in 2024, according to Stride Ventures' Global Private Debt Report. Saudi Arabia accounted for $3.9B of the total, with fintech representing 95.5% of deployment. Key transactions included Tamara ($2.4B), Lendo ($740M), Deem ($400M) and CredibleX ($100M). Private debt outpaced venture capital in the region's 2025 funding mix, contributing $4.1B of $7.4B tracked, a shift Stride attributed to sovereign-backed capital, regulatory enablement and fintech expansion. Full report here.

🧘 Wellbees has raised $3.6M in a Series A led by Qatar Development Bank, opening a Qatar office as part of its GCC expansion. The AI-powered employee wellbeing platform, founded in 2021 by Turkish entrepreneur Melis Abacıoğlu, helps organizations support staff across physical, mental, financial and other wellbeing areas. Other investors include 212, Sabancı Ventures, SABAH.fund, A-typical Ventures, Arya VC and Sharks & Partners. Wellbees operates in the UAE, UK, US and Türkiye.

🔬 QIA has participated in Nearfield Instruments' $380M Series D at a $1.6B valuation, backing the Dutch semiconductor metrology company alongside Fidelity, Temasek, Walden Catalyst and others. Founded in 2016 by Hamed Sadeghian and Roland van Vliet, Nearfield develops machines to measure and inspect microscopic features on advanced chips at nanometer scale.

🛢️ Aramco Ventures has participated in Hang Ten Systems' $32M Seed round, backing the US startup founded by former Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka. Hang Ten aims to provide AI-based software development and operations services, challenging a tech services sector that’s traditionally relied on large human teams.

🇦🇪 MGX has raised close to $50B from regional and global investors, Bloomberg reported, ranking it among the largest dedicated AI investment vehicles ever raised. The Abu Dhabi firm, chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan and backed by Mubadala and G42, drew capital from sovereign wealth funds, global pension funds and institutional investors. MGX has assembled a portfolio spanning OpenAI, xAI and data centre infrastructure, and is separately exploring an acquisition of Singapore-based DayOne, which operates data centres across Southeast Asia and has been targeting a $20B US IPO, according to Reuters.

⚖️ Stockholm-based Legora and Gulf law firm Tamimi & Co are launching an Arabic legal AI platform in the coming weeks, developed using Arabic-native case law and legal content from across MENA. Legora, which raised $550M at a $5.5B valuation in March followed by a $50M extension with Nvidia's NVentures, wants to open a Gulf office "as a strategic priority." The platform addresses language gaps that limit accuracy for Arabic-speaking lawyers. FWDstart previously examined the state of legal AI in the region.

Tell your story to MENA tech: Share your product or thesis with 7,500+ founders, VCs, and operators across the region. Newsletter, podcast, or a dedicated deep-dive – we'll find the right format.

Have a story for us? Reach FWDstart securely on Signal at fwdstart.32. End-to-end encrypted, anonymous if you want it to be.