Happy Friday friends 👋

We were on the ground in Dubai yesterday for Lean Technologies’ Pay by Bank launch event as a media partner, where the company unveiled a new product suite on the UAE's Open Finance rails. You can catch the full lowdown on what was announced below, and keep your eyes peeled for a podcast episode coming soon where we dig into the strategy in more detail with the company’s CPO Tewfik Cassis.

On that note, you may have noticed that the FWDstart podcast is back in action. We've recorded some really excellent episodes that will be coming to your inbox every Monday from here on out, including this week's sit-down with Comfi co-founders Sanjar Samiev and Denis Gavrilin on raising $65 million to build B2B BNPL for MENA's SMEs.

On the Delivery Hero saga front, Ninja has reportedly hired Goldman Sachs, Citi, UBS, and Riyad Capital to advise on a potential bid for the German group's Middle East assets, with an indicative offer for HungerStation reportedly already submitted.

Elsewhere, Revolut has secured full UAE central bank licences, completing its regulatory path to launch, CNTXT AI has closed a $60 million Series A co-led by AI71 and BlueFive Capital to scale sovereign AI infrastructure, and Alaan has launched an AI-native business bank account in partnership with Islamic bank ruya.

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CNTXT AI (🇦🇪 UAE), a sovereign AI infrastructure company building data-secure AI platforms for enterprise and government, including Munsit, an Arabic voice platform, has raised $60M in a Series A, co-led by AI71 and BlueFive Capital.

Tern (🇦🇪 UAE), a rental rewards platform letting tenants pay rent by credit card and earn loyalty points, has raised an undisclosed strategic round from Dubizzle Group, which will exclusively integrate Tern across Bayut and dubizzle.

Sovra (🇦🇪 UAE), a self-custodial dollar account holding balances in USDC for MENA users, has raised $2M+ in a pre-Seed round, led by Anthony Ghosn’s Pharsalus Capital, with angel participation from Ramp founder Karim Atiyeh, Lean Technologies founder Hisham Al-Falih, 21Shares founder Hany Rashwan, and Naguib Sawiris.

Pickappo (🇸🇦 KSA), a logistics tech platform connecting delivery providers, ordering platforms, and merchants through a unified on-demand delivery network, has raised $530K in a pre-Seed round from an angel investor and an investment fund.

🥷 Ninja has reportedly hired Goldman Sachs, Citi, UBS and Riyad Capital to advise on a potential bid for Delivery Hero's Middle East assets, according to Asharq Business citing a source. It’s suggested that the Saudi q-commerce unicorn has submitted an indicative offer for HungerStation and expressed interest in parts of Talabat. Riyad Capital led Ninja's $250M round last year at a $1.5B valuation. Ninja was founded by Ebrahim Al-Jassim, who built HungerStation before a 2019 fallout with Delivery Hero that saw him and the platform's executive team terminated.

💸 Lean Technologies has launched four Pay by Bank products in the UAE, unveiled at an event in Dubai on 18 June, which FWDstart attended as media partner. The suite lets businesses collect payments directly from customer bank accounts on the central bank's Open Finance rails, including one-click deposits with 12-month consent, recurring collections with pre-pull balance checks, e-commerce checkout with delegated authentication, and low-code payment links. The launch lands as Lean, which has raised more than $100 million from backers including General Catalyst, Peak XV (then Sequoia India), and Shorooq positions itself for a potential public listing while weighing expansion into stablecoins, cross-border payments and remittances.

🇦🇪 Revolut has received its Stored Value Facilities and Retail Payment Services licences from the Central Bank of the UAE, completing a regulatory process that began with in-principle approval in September 2025. Once live, UAE customers will be able to hold and manage multiple currencies, make payments with physical and virtual cards, and send money locally and internationally through the app. The London-based fintech, which has around 75 million users globally and is weighing a share sale at a $115B valuation, is now building out local infrastructure under GCC CEO Ambareen Musa.

💳 Alaan has launched a business bank account embedded in its spend management platform, powered by Islamic bank ruya's Banking-as-a-Service infrastructure. The account combines corporate cards, local and cross-border payments to 40+ countries, invoice automation and accounting sync in what Alaan calls the region's first AI-native business banking workflow. Alaan raised a $48M Series A led by Peak XV in August 2025.

In this episode, we sit down with Sanjar Samiev and Denis Gavrilin, co-founders of Comfi, the B2B buy-now-pay-later platform that recently raised a $65 million pre-Series A to finance the invoices the rest of the market would rather ignore.

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

🏗️ Saudi contech company WakeCap has acquired Singapore's Frontline, an AI-powered construction planning platform, expanding from real-time jobsite monitoring into project planning and optimisation. WakeCap, founded in 2017 by Hassan Albalawi and Ishita Sood, has tracked more than 150 million labour hours across giga-projects including NEOM, Qiddiya and King Salman Park. The deal follows WakeCap's acquisition of Brazil's Trackfy last November and a $28M Series A raise in May 2025 led by US-based UP Partners. Terms were not disclosed.

🇺🇿 Golden Gate Ventures has opened an Uzbekistan office through its Qatar-based MENA fund, partnering with the Uzbek-Oman Investment Company to connect Central Asian founders with Gulf capital and customers. The Singapore-headquartered firm also signed an MoU with IT Park, Uzbekistan's technology hub, covering entrepreneurship programmes, startup pipeline development and co-investment. The office, unveiled at the Tashkent International Investment Forum, marks the fund's first dedicated Central Asian presence and will focus on fintech, AI, clean energy and logistics.

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