Happy Friday friends 👋

A slightly interrupted schedule this week, as illness got the better of us for a few days.

Alas, the news cycle waits for no one. Institutional investors put in orders for more than 11 times the MNT-Halan shares on offer, suggesting the roughly $750M valuation was more than enough to whet the appetite.

Dubai’s Oraseya Capital has doubled its fund to $272 million and broadened its mandate well beyond Dubai, and SoftBank is reportedly back in the Gulf seeking up to $100 billion for a new fund, with Masayoshi Son apparently keen to see if lightning strikes twice.

QIA has also added a 13th manager to its $3B fund of funds programme, with San Francisco’s Activate Capital opening its first international office in Doha to deploy existing capital in energy, industrial and space tech, rather than raising a separate regional fund.

And on a more sobering note, Moroccan agritech YoLa Fresh, founded by ex-Careem and Jumia execs, has shut down after failing to secure fresh funding, having raised $9 million to date.

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This and much (much) more below 👇

This week’s round-up is a 7 min read:

Autobia (🇸🇦 KSA), a wholesale auto-parts platform, has raised $12M in a Series A led by Artal Capital, with participation from AlJazira Capital and Wa'ed Ventures.

JustAd (🇦🇪 UAE), a campaign management platform that lets advertisers spread ad spend over installments of up to 12 months, has secured $5M from angel investor Imad Jomaa to enter new markets from early 2027.

Ghanem (🇸🇦 KSA), a fractional property ownership platform operating in the Real Estate General Authority sandbox, has added $1.5M from real-estate companies and strategic angels, taking its total raised to $8.6M.

Alo Hakeem (🇸🇾 Syria), which connects patients with home-healthcare providers in Aleppo, Damascus and Hama, has raised a $165K pre-seed led by EBLA Ventures.

Salehli (🇸🇾 Syria), a marketplace for maintenance and renovation services, has secured $100K from EBLA Ventures to add digital payments and expand into more Syrian cities.

Funding Souq (🇸🇦 KSA), a Sharia-compliant SME lending platform, has received an undisclosed strategic investment from Foodics, which will channel financing to its restaurant merchants in Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Independent reporting, deep dives and analysis on the companies, investors and markets shaping tech across MENA.

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YoLa Fresh, the Moroccan fresh-produce distributor backed by Al Mada Ventures and Algebra Ventures, has ceased operations after failing to secure further financing, having raised $9 million to date.

The closure was confirmed by co-founders Larbi Alaoui Belrhiti and Youssef Mamou, who launched the Casablanca-based business in 2023 following careers in ecommerce and ride-hailing. Alaoui Belrhiti previously led Jumia’s Moroccan operations, while Mamou held senior roles at Careem before going on to head 212 Founders, Morocco’s investment and business support programme.

🇦🇪 DIEZA has doubled Oraseya Capital's fund to AED1B ($272M), raising its max investment per company from $3M to $6M and extending its remit beyond Series B. The investor can now back companies of strategic relevance to the UAE wherever they are based, broadening a mandate originally focused on Dubai businesses and overseas companies looking to establish operations there. It has 66 active portfolio companies, including Calo and erad, and will continue investing at pre-seed and seed alongside the greater emphasis on later-stage businesses.

🇦🇪 Phoenix Venture Partners has completed its debut fundraise, reporting $23M across its fund and dedicated co-investment vehicles. The Abu Dhabi manager says it stopped accepting commitments on October 3, having originally targeted $50M, and hasn't disclosed the fund's standalone size. It plans to grow its portfolio from seven companies to 15–20, with around 45% of committed capital still available. Recent investments include Sav and the COFE Tech secondary transaction we covered last week.

🇶🇦 Activate Capital is opening its first international office in Doha, backed by a commitment from QIA’s $3B Fund of Funds programme. The SF firm, founded in 2017 and managing more than $1B across three funds, invests in energy, industrial and space tech from Series B onwards, with Crusoe, Muon Space and Voltus in its portfolio. Partner Anup Jacob told Semafor that talks with QIA began about a year ago and that investors wanted the office to deploy existing capital rather than raise a separate regional fund, citing cheaper energy and access to compute as reasons to bring portfolio companies to the region. Activate is the programme’s 13th manager.

🇯🇵 SoftBank is seeking up to $100B from Gulf investors, with Masayoshi Son holding talks in recent weeks with senior figures including in the UAE, the FT reported. The money would seed a fund to buy companies and improve their operations with AI and other advanced technology, with Roze, SoftBank’s robotics and physical AI business, expected to play a key role. Mubadala and the PIF both backed Son’s first $100B Vision Fund in 2017. The approach comes at an awkward moment, with OpenAI’s IPO delayed, and SoftBank’s shares down more than 30% from their June peak.

🤖 Former OpenAI engineer Abdulrahman Alfozan has been charged in the US with illegally intercepting oral communications after allegedly placing a concealed recording device in an executive conference room at the company’s San Francisco offices. Alfozan, who was arrested on October 9 and subsequently dismissed, was also appointed a venture partner at Saudi VC firm RAED Ventures in February 2025. The DOJ has made no allegation of wrongdoing against RAED. OpenAI says it has found no indication that he improperly accessed or extracted model weights, source code or customer data. His lawyer says he will contest the allegations and detention. The charge concerns unlawful recording, rather than espionage, and Alfozan is presumed innocent.

🇶🇦 A-typical Ventures has backed Evos’s $9M pre-Seed, co-led by Uncork Capital and Field Ventures. The New York startup, founded this year by Urav Shah, builds AI agents that learn industrial workflows from experienced staff and then run those tasks inside the software companies already use. Evos says it passed $1M in ARR four weeks after launch. The company was co-built by The Utopia Studio, which also handled its GCC market entry, before A-typical invested. Both the studio and the fund sit under Doha-based Utopia Capital Management, whose Middle East vehicle was the first international fund selected under QIA’s $1B fund of funds.

🇪🇬 MNT-Halan’s institutional IPO tranche was 11.2 times oversubscribed, rising to 19.4 times excluding cornerstone investors. More than 300 investors across over ten countries placed orders at EGP 24.50 per share, valuing the company at roughly EGP 39B. The offering comprises 320M existing shares, or 20% of the business before the closed subscription, with 272M allocated to institutions and 48M to retail. Retail subscriptions were scheduled to close yesterday.

🚌 Swvl reported 59% revenue growth to $16.2M for the first half of 2026, in results released on 8 October. GCC revenue more than doubled to $7.1M while Egypt grew 35% to $9.1M, with recurring contracts now 88% of the total as the company leans further into enterprise. Gross profit rose 35%, though margin narrowed from 21.5% to 18.2%, which Swvl attributed to a higher UAE revenue mix.

Stride's Ishpreet Singh Gandhi on why founders rely too heavily on equity, how venture debt can change the economics of scaling a startup, and what Stride’s experience in India tells us about the Gulf’s emerging private credit market.