Happy Friday, friends 👋

PropertyFinder, wasted no time at all following up their $525M injection from Permira and Blackstone in September with a new $170M round carrying a decidedly more local flavour. The breakdown: $75M from Mubadala, another $75M from an unnamed UAE sovereign wealth fund, and (here's where it gets interesting) $20M from BECO Capital via their newly launched $250M Growth Fund I.

That's the same BECO who were PropertyFinder's very first institutional backer way back in 2012, leading their $1.5M seed round, before exiting in 2024 by selling their stake back to the company at a $1B valuation and returning over $80M to LPs. Just one year later, Permira and Blackstone led a round at a $2B valuation according to the FT.

Elsewhere this week: Yakeey, a Moroccan property marketplace, raised a $15M Series A (the largest proptech round the country's ever seen). BNPL fever has evidently reached Qatar, with homegrown player PayLater securing $10M in seed backing. There was also a flurry of M&A activity, with Abwaab, Glamera and Merit each snapping up businesses to bolster their offerings.

And at long last, the interminable U.S. TikTok saga appears to have finally been put to rest this week. With the dust settling, it's confirmed that Abu Dhabi will have a significant stake in the newly restructured U.S. operation, with MGX (the Abu Dhabi AI investment fund backed by G42 and Mubadala) finalising a 15% stake and taking a seat on the seven-member board.

Also, thank you for the kind words on our MENA Inc piece. If you enjoyed it, please do consider sharing, every little helps.

This and much more below 👇

This week’s round-up is a 5 min read:

Property Finder (🇦🇪 UAE), the region’s leading online property marketplace, has raised $170M in new funding from Mubadala Investment Company, another UAE sovereign wealth fund, and BECO Capital to accelerate the development of its AI-driven real estate OS and expand its regional market leadership.

Yakeey (🇲🇦 Morocco), a managed property marketplace for residential real estate, has raised $15M in a Series A round, the largest for a proptech in the country, led by Enza Capital, IFC, Beltone Venture Capital and CDG Invest, to expand its domestic operations and support entry into new markets.

PayLater (🇶🇦 Qatar), the first Sharia-compliant Buy Now, Pay Later platform licensed by the Qatar Central Bank, has secured $10M in Seed funding led by LuLu Alternative Investments with participation from Qatar Development Bank and KBN Holding, to expand into new verticals including travel and healthcare.

Vennre (🇸🇦 KSA), a wealth management platform providing high-earning professionals with access to private market investments, has raised $9.6M in a pre-Series A round co-led by Vision Ventures and anb seed Fund with participation from Sanabil 500, Ace & Co and Plus VC, to expand its client base and deepen its Saudi presence.

Enakl (🇲🇦 Morocco), a shared mobility startup building intelligent transport networks, has raised $2.3M in Seed funding led by Azur Innovation Fund, Witamax and MFounders with participation from Catalyst Fund and Digital Africa, to launch its enterprise SaaS platform and scale its mobility-as-a-service model.

Mantas (🇦🇪 UAE), an insurtech startup providing parametric insurance to cover cloud downtime and digital risks, has raised $1.77M in Seed funding with participation from Nuwa Capital, Suhail Ventures, Plus VC and OQAL Angel Syndicate, to launch its product and protect digital-first businesses from service outages.

Yozo (🇦🇪 UAE), an AI-native revenue engine that automates marketing and growth for e-commerce brands, has raised $1.7M in pre-Seed funding co-led by Access Bridge Ventures and Disruptech Ventures with participation from Arzan VC, Oraseya Capital and Plus VC, to scale its autonomous AI agents.

Declic (🇸🇦 KSA), an AI-powered social networking platform designed to facilitate real-world community experiences and events, has raised $1M in Seed funding led by VidMatic Digital DMCC, to enhance its capabilities across the Kingdom.

Juthor (🇸🇦 KSA), a cloud-based retail management platform enabling merchants to sync sales and inventory across multiple marketplaces, has secured $500K in pre-Seed funding led by Flat6Labs with participation from angel investors, to support product development and merchant onboarding.

Qarah (🇸🇦 KSA), a specialised marketplace for the sale and maintenance of water desalination filters and misting systems, has closed a multi-million riyal investment round led by a group of angels, to expand its network of certified technicians and develop its infrastructure across the Kingdom.

🎓 Jordan-based edtech Abwaab has acquired Apex Education, a boutique college admissions advisory that's placed students at Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, and other elite institutions since its 2019 launch. The deal lets Abwaab, which has raised over $30 million to build a digital alternative to MENA's offline tutoring centres, expand beyond national curriculum support into high-end international university pathways Abwaab currently operates across Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Oman, and Saudi Arabia after exiting Pakistan following its acquisition of Edmatrix.

💅 Saudi lifestyle tech platform Glamera has acquired Bookr, a Kuwait-based salon SaaS and booking platform, for an undisclosed sum. Glamera, founded in 2022, has processed over SAR 4B in transactions across 4,500+ service providers and is positioning itself ahead of a planned Nomu listing. The deal brings Bookr's 300K+ users across Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia into Glamera's ecosystem, which spans booking, payments, POS, and supply-chain integrations. Both companies raised capital recently. Bookr last raised a $1.5M bridge in early 2024, led by Plus VC.

🎯 Riyadh-based Merit, an engagement technology company that provides B2B rewards, gift cards, and loyalty programs to increase customer and employee engagement, has acquired Australian sales incentives specialist Synchro Marketing. Merit, which raised a $40 million Series B last year led by Al Istithmar Capital and Tech Invest Com, is building out sector-specific capabilities, and Synchro brings 30+ years of expertise running incentive programs for automotive and oil & gas dealer networks, with clients including Toyota, Lexus, and ExxonMobil.

🏗️ The UAE's Stargate data centre project has ballooned to over $30 billion, a 50% increase from the initial $20 billion estimate announced in spring 2025, according to the country’s AI minister Omar Al Olama speaking at Abu Dhabi's Machines Can Think summit. The 5GW campus will span 19.2 square kilometers – nine times the size of Monaco – with the first phase expected in Q3 2026. G42's Khazna Data Centres is developing the facility with backing from OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco, SoftBank, and South Korea.

🧠 MBZUAI has released K2 Think V2, a fully open-source reasoning model that independent testing shows performs on par with leading US and Chinese systems, while being trained at a fraction of the cost using fewer than 2,000 NVIDIA chips. The release addresses what MBZUAI president Eric Xing called a growing Western gap in open-weight models as Chinese groups surge ahead and US companies grow cautious about transparency.

This week's guest is Djamel Mohand, a Rocket Internet alumnus who landed in Saudi Arabia over a decade ago, back when relocating to the Kingdom for tech was rather less fashionable than it is today. What was supposed to be a six-month stint turned into ten years of building businesses across the region, most notably as COO at Foodics, where he helped scale the restaurant management platform to over 30,000 restaurants across 25 countries. We get into the Rocket Internet origin story, what he learned scaling Foodics, and why the gap between having a data policy and actually implementing one is where the real opportunity lies.

For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

📱 MGX, the Abu Dhabi AI investment fund backed by G42 and Mubadala, has officially finalised a 15% stake in TikTok's restructured US operations alongside Oracle and Silver Lake as managing investors. The deal creates TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC with a seven-member board (MGX's David Scott will represent the fund), resolving years of political tension over ByteDance's ownership and avoiding a nationwide ban that Trump had previously threatened during his first term.

🔌 Upscale AI has raised a $200 million Series A with participation from Aramco's Prosperity7 Ventures, in a round led by Tiger Global, Premji Invest, and Xora Innovation, alongside Intel Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, and others. The 2025-founded company is building AI networking infrastructure that unifies GPUs, accelerators, memory, storage, and networking into a single synchronised system via its SkyHammer scale-up solution, aiming to solve what it sees as networking's critical bottleneck in scaling AI.

💡 Neurophos has raised $110 million in Series A led by Gates Frontier, with Microsoft's M12 and Aramco Ventures backing the photonic AI chip startup's bid to crack silicon's power wall. Founded in 2020, the Austin-based company is developing optical processing units (OPUs) for AI inference that promise dramatic power consumption cuts compared to traditional GPUs.