Happy Friday friends 👋

We hope you didn't miss us too much last week. If your reading diet has had a FWDstart-shaped hole in it since, fear not, we've got a roundup of funding announcements from the past two weeks to make sure you're fully up to speed.

Two standout stories, come from diaspora further afield. Notion has acquired ZeroEntropy, the AI search startup co-founded by Rabat-born CEO Ghita Houir Alami, who takes over Notion's Model Research group after her team's reranking model quietly powered Notion AI's search for the past two months. And Brookfield has agreed to acquire Aypa Power, the North American battery storage platform built by Amman-raised founder Moe Hajabed, for approximately $7 billion in enterprise value.

Elsewhere, UAE credit reports will include Tabby and Tamara account data from July, meaning banks get a view of consumers' BNPL commitments for the first time, and making the Emirates the first major market anywhere to bring its dominant BNPL providers into the national credit file simultaneously. Abhi Microfinance Bank is planning an $11 million Karachi listing as it chases the Nubank and Kaspi playbook, and it's apparently SVF licence season at the UAE Central Bank, with Pemo, Checkout.com, and KamelPay all announcing approvals in the space of a week.

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SILQ (🇸🇦 KSA), the B2B commerce and embedded finance group formed by the ShopUp–Sary merger, has secured a $75M Shariah-compliant debt facility from Fasanara Capital for Fina, its SME lending arm, taking its announced debt capital this month to $95M.

Epic Markets (🇦🇪 UAE), a multi-asset brokerage bringing institutional-grade trade execution to retail investors, has raised $10M in a pre-Seed round from sole investor Karatage.

Labby (🇸🇾 Syria), a super app combining ride-hailing, food delivery, e-commerce, and digital payments, has raised $10M from a consortium of UAE and Saudi investors, described as the first direct foreign investment into a Syrian tech startup.

Bundle (🇦🇪 UAE), a Web3 rewards platform letting brands pool their incentive budgets into shared prize pools, has raised $5.5M in a pre-Seed round, co-led by Ethereal Ventures and Further Ventures, with participation from Nascent, GSR, Scenius Capital, Anchorage Digital, and Nuwa Capital.

Fincart (🇪🇬 Egypt), an e-commerce operations platform connecting merchants to couriers and lending against their sales data, has raised $2.8M in an oversubscribed Seed round, co-led by Launch Africa and Antler MENAP, with participation from Yango Ventures, Five35 Ventures, Bluestream Capital, Hi2 Global, and Kalahari Venture Labs.

Ash Games (🇸🇦 KSA), a studio building PC and console action-adventure titles drawn from Saudi history and folklore, with flagship title Nomad due in 2027, has raised $1.5M in a Seed round, co-led by Merak Capital and Impact46 through the Merak Gaming Fund.

Reme-D (🇪🇬 Egypt), a molecular diagnostics manufacturer producing temperature-resilient tests for TB, HIV, hepatitis, and HPV, has raised $1.45M in a Pre-Series A round, led by Anara Impact Capital, with participation from the Global Innovation Fund and Africa Health Ventures.

SkipCash (🇶🇦 Qatar), a digital payments provider offering merchant acquiring, payment gateways, QR payments, and SoftPOS to merchants, has secured an undisclosed strategic investment from Qatar International Islamic Bank (QIIB).

🇵🇰 Abhi Microfinance Bank is preparing an $11M Karachi listing, offering around 14% in new shares, Bloomberg has reported. The lender, formerly FINCA Microfinance Bank, swung from a $6.3M annual loss to a record $3.7M profit in its first full year under Abhi's ownership after the fintech group digitised operations and closed loss-making branches. CEO Omair Ansari says he wants the bank to follow Nubank and Kaspi, with plans spanning gold-backed lending and a crypto payments corridor. YC-backed Abhi, which launched earned wage access in Saudi Arabia last year through a $200M Alraedah partnership, has raised more than $50M (equity + debt) since 2021. The IPO lands in Pakistan's busiest year for listings, with ten offerings raising a record $71M so far.

💳 Al Etihad Credit Bureau will add Tabby and Tamara account data to credit reports from July, giving banks a view of consumers' BNPL commitments for the first time, covering existing and new customers along with historical transactions. The data will appear in reports but won't yet move credit scores, the same separation US bureaus have drawn. It's a notable first, as no major Western market has brought its dominant BNPL providers into the national credit file simultaneously, with Klarna and Afterpay still withholding most US data while Affirm reports fully. In Saudi, both companies' largest market, BNPL data already flows to credit bureau SIMAH under SAMA requirements, though analysts have described coverage there as incomplete.

🏦 It's SVF licence season at the UAE’s Central Bank. Three fintechs announced Stored Value Facilities approvals over the last week: spend management platform Pemo and global payments company Checkout.com both received in-principle approval, while payroll fintech KamelPay secured full SVF and Retail Payment Services licences. Pemo, one of the first spend management platforms to get the nod, plans digital wallets and fund-holding for SMEs; Checkout.com will add issuing alongside its acquiring services, letting merchants fund cards directly from acquired balances; KamelPay serves 2,000+ corporate clients and 400,000 employees through its WPS payroll platform. The flurry follows Tabby's SVF licence in April and Revolut's full licensing in June.

🔍 Notion has acquired ZeroEntropy, the AI search startup co-founded by Moroccan CEO Ghita Houir Alami, with the whole team joining and Houir Alami taking over Notion's Model Research group. The deal grew out of a customer relationship, as Notion AI's search has run on ZeroEntropy's reranking model for the past two months, cutting latency 85% after replacing models from larger competitors. The YC-backed startup, founded in 2024, raised a $4.2M seed led by Initialized Capital just a year ago. Rabat-born Houir Alami left Morocco at 17 for École Polytechnique before UC Berkeley. Terms were not disclosed.

🔋 Brookfield has agreed to acquire Aypa Power for approx $7B in enterprise value, buying North America's largest standalone battery storage platform from Blackstone in one of the sector's biggest deals to date. Aypa was built by Amman-raised founder Moe Hajabed, who started the business in Canada as behind-the-meter storage developer NRStor C&I and sold it to Blackstone in 2020 with around 200 MWh contracted. Six years later it holds 6.5 GW of operating and contracted capacity with a pipeline above 20 GW. Hajabed called the outcome bittersweet, writing that growing up in Amman he never imagined founding a company of this scale. The deal is expected to close later this year.

🔎 BY Venture Partners has joined a $2M pre-seed round for Canadian AI startup ChatFeatured, backing the answer engine optimisation platform alongside lead investor Storytime Capital and Garage Capital. Founded in 2026 by Farris Nasr and Nithiiyan Skhanthan, ChatFeatured helps marketing teams monitor and improve how brands appear in AI-generated responses across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, automating content creation to lift AI citations. The funding will support autonomous AI search agents that identify and execute optimisation opportunities automatically.

🏦 FAB is taking a nearly $1B share of SoftBank's $40B bridge loan backing its OpenAI investment, joining 21 new lenders allocated around $7B in a broader syndication phase. The UAE's largest bank took its slice alongside GIC and Standard Chartered, which also each took nearly $1B, with the rest going to European, Japanese and Taiwanese banks. The 12-month loan, signed in March and one of the largest bridge financings ever in Asia-Pacific, funds a $30B follow-on investment in OpenAI through Vision Fund 2 and pays around 250 basis points over SOFR. Some bankers have raised concerns over SoftBank's exposure to OpenAI, whose commitments from Masayoshi Son now exceed $60B, as competition from rivals including Anthropic grows.

🇸🇦 Jada Fund of Funds has made its first commitment to Growth Catalyst Fund I, the private equity fund targeting $200M for growth-stage Saudi SMEs. Led by Turki Al-Dayel, previously chair of SVC's investment committee, the fund targets founder-led, upper-middle-market companies with flexibility to back pre-IPO businesses that have outgrown venture capital. It aims to help bridge a Saudi SME financing gap estimated at SAR 300-500B. The commitment follows SVC's investment in the fund earlier this year; Jada hasn’t disclosed its ticket size.

🌱 SVC has invested in SEEDRA Ventures Fund II, backing the CMA-licensed manager's oversubscribed early-stage vehicle. The sector-agnostic fund targets high-growth Saudi tech startups across AI, fintech and proptech. Nora Alsarhan made the statement as SVC CEO, having taken over from founding chief Nabeel Koshak on 1 July. SEEDRA, founded in 2019, is led by Managing Partner Haitham Alforaih.

🤝 Brookfield has reached a $2B first close on its PIF-anchored Middle East private equity fund, with around half the capital expected to be deployed in Saudi Arabia. Brookfield Middle East Partners will pursue buyouts and minority growth investments across financial services, consumer, industrials, technology and healthcare, run from the firm's Riyadh office. Brookfield is committing $500M of its own capital alongside PIF and other regional and international institutions.

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