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Foodics, the Riyadh-based restaurant operations and payments platform, has completed its full acquisition of Norma AI, a Greece-based AI company built for the hospitality industry. Terms were not disclosed.
The deal takes Foodics to 100% ownership, building on a minority stake it acquired in Q1 2025. Norma's technology was integrated into the Foodics platform following that initial investment and has since been adopted across more than 10,000 Foodics customer branches. The Norma team now joins a dedicated Foodics AI division, with its analytics agent and business intelligence application folded into the core product.
Founded by George Henein and Anastasios Anastasiadis, Norma launched what the companies describe as the hospitality industry's first natural-language business intelligence application in 2024, letting non-technical operators ask questions in plain language, get instant answers, and build dashboards in seconds.
Beyond querying, the platform connects to a restaurant's existing systems in minutes and uses AI to forecast sales at the level of individual menu items, feeding inventory and prep decisions, with the company claiming the demand prediction can cut a restaurant's cost of goods sold by 5 to 10% by reducing over-ordering and food waste.
Foodics co-founder and CEO Ahmad AlZaini tied the deal to the growing complexity of restaurant data. "Successful restaurants will be the ones who close that gap, utilising intelligence in every layer of their operations," he said, adding that the acquisition accelerates the company's agentic AI roadmap and, for operators, should translate into "greater efficiency, smarter decision-making, and healthier profit margins."
Norma co-founder George Henein said the tie-up gives his team "the scale, resources, and reach to accelerate the adoption of what we're building."
Founded in 2014 by Al-Zaini and Mosab Alothmani, Foodics powers more than 40,000 restaurant branches across the GCC and North Africa and has processed over 6 billion orders, with gross merchandise volume exceeding $12 billion.
The company raised a record $170 million Series C in 2022 led by Prosus and Sanabil Investments, and operates Foodics Pay, a fintech arm licensed by the Saudi Central Bank.
AlZaini told Asharq in May 2024 that Foodics was studying an IPO of a 30% stake on the Saudi market by the end of 2025. That timeline has since passed without a listing, and Foodics has not publicly set a new date.
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