Eid Mubarak, friends 👋

We hope you and yours are safe and well. It is, to put it plainly, a difficult Eid. It’s exceedingly hard to feel celebratory when innocent people across the region are suffering, and we won't pretend otherwise.

Careem's Mudassir Sheikha put it well yesterday when he spoke about the strange duality of building from a place of safety while so many are simply trying to survive, and the responsibility that comes with that. We agree. The region needs its builders to keep building, and to think bigger, not smaller, in moments like these.

In that spirit, this week's edition does have things worth celebrating.

Replit's Amjad Masad and Haya Odeh have been selected as Endeavor Entrepreneurs, making Replit Endeavor's 100th unicorn globally and the highest-valued company to emerge from Jordan's tech ecosystem. Ramp's Karim Atiyeh, the Lebanese co-founder of the $32 billion fintech, is expanding into Europe with the acquisition of Swedish outfit Billhop.

STV deployed its callable equity instrument in Africa for the first time. And Speedinvest launched a dedicated Africa fund with a €40 million EIB anchor.

Stay safe, and we'll see you again next week.

This and much more below 👇

This week’s round-up is a 5 min read:

Utexo (🇦🇪 UAE), a blockchain infrastructure company building enterprise-grade APIs enabling financial institutions, digital wallets, and exchanges to process USDT stablecoin payments on the Bitcoin network, has raised $7.5M in a Seed round, led by Tether, with participation from Big Brain Holdings, Portal Ventures, Franklin Templeton, Maven11 Capital, and Fulgur Ventures.

Kudwa (🇦🇪 UAE), an AI-native financial planning and analysis platform automating consolidation, forecasting, and performance reporting across multiple data sources for businesses with 50 to 500 employees, has raised $1.1M, backed by 1818 Venture Capital, F6 Ventures, Sparked VC, IM Fndg, and IVP.

Miftah (🇸🇾 Syria), a proptech building a verification-first digital real estate marketplace for Syria, combining identity and biometric checks with consumer listings, broker CRM tools, and localised market analytics, has raised an undisclosed pre-Seed round from undisclosed investors.

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

Offer expires midnight, Friday 20th March.

🌍 Speedinvest has launched its first dedicated Africa fund after securing a €40M anchor from EIB Global, the development finance arm of the European Investment Bank. The fund will invest at seed and Series A in fintech and mobile-first startups across both North and Sub-Saharan Africa, with at least 30% allocated to companies supporting women as founders, employees, or consumers. The vehicle is led by partners Deepali Nangia and Rana Abdel Latif. Speedinvest has made over 16 African investments to date, including FairMoney, Khazna, MoPhones, and Moove (the Lagos-founded mobility fintech now valued at over $2B). The Vienna-based firm is also now backed by QIA as part of its expanded $3 billion Fund of Funds programme announced at Web Summit Qatar.

🇯🇴 Endeavor Jordan has selected Replit co-founders Amjad Masad and Haya Odeh as Endeavor Entrepreneurs, marking the network's first unicorn selection from Jordan and its 100th unicorn globally. The selection comes weeks after Replit closed a $400 million Series D at a $9 billion valuation. Masad was born and raised in Amman, studied at Princess Sumaya University, and arrived in the US in 2011 with roughly $100 after airport officials forced him to buy a return ticket. Odeh, his wife and VP of Design, was born in Abu Dhabi and raised in Jordan, where she studied at Al-Ahliyya Amman University. The two officially founded Replit in 2016 alongside Masad's brother Faris. It's now the highest-valued company to emerge from Jordan's tech ecosystem.

🇱🇧 Ramp, the $32 billion fintech co-founded by Lebanese entrepreneur Karim Atiyeh, has acquired Stockholm- and London-based Billhop to bring its corporate card and spend management platform to UK and European businesses for the first time. Billhop holds FCA and Swedish Finansinspektionen authorizations with EEA passporting rights. Ramp will open London and Stockholm offices and begin onboarding UK/EU businesses this summer. Atiyeh, born and raised in Beirut and educated at Collège Notre-Dame de Jamhour and Harvard, holds roughly 10% of Ramp, making him the youngest Arab American billionaire with an estimated $1.3 billion net worth. Ramp processes over $100 billion in purchases annually across 50,000+ businesses.

📱 Kenyan refurbished smartphone financing platform MoPhones has secured up to $2M in callable equity from STV, becoming the first African company to receive the Riyadh-based firm's NICE (Non-Dilutive Investment in Callable Equity) structure. STV has committed over $65 million through NICE to date, previously deploying into GCC companies including Tabby, Invygo, and Stake. The Sharia-compliant instrument allows revenue-linked repayments without covenants, with unpaid tranches converting to equity rather than triggering default. MoPhones, backed by Speedinvest since 2023 and co-founded by Sjoerd Nikkelen and Nate Heller, offers instalment-based financing on refurbished smartphones in Kenya.

🔐 Wa'ed Ventures has made a strategic investment in Resemble AI, the California-based company specialising in AI voice generation and real-time deepfake detection. The investment supports Resemble AI's expansion into the Middle East as deepfake incidents in Saudi Arabia increased 600% last year, with global deepfake-related scams causing over $25 billion in losses in 2024. Resemble AI's platform enables both cloud and on-premise deployment, allowing government and regulated organizations to analyse content without sending sensitive data to external servers. The startup previously raised $13 million in December from Google's AI Future Fund, Sony Innovation Fund, Javelin, and Ubiquity.

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

🛒 Algerian super app Yassir has acquired Kawarizmi, a Paris-based programmatic trading desk and ad-tech company specialising in data-driven media buying across Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. The deal follows Yassir's acquisition of the Uno hypermarket chain from Cevital Group, with both moves positioning the company to build a fully integrated retail media and advertising ecosystem. Founded in 2017 by Noureddine Tayebi and El Mahdi Yettou, Yassir operates across 60+ cities in six countries with more than 8 million users. Kawarizmi will continue as a standalone programmatic entity within the group, helping Yassir monetise first-party data and expand brand partnerships across EMEA.

🎓 Egyptian AI career services platform Qualiphi has acquired Career Club from iCareer in a six-figure deal completed in H2 2025. Career Club, one of the region's first virtual career centres, had partnered with ILO, UK Aid, and GIZ on employability programs. Qualiphi, founded by Nevien Magdy, now serves the Egyptian Ministry of Higher Education, Ain Shams University, and the Arab Academy among others, supporting over 500,000 students in 2025.