Happy Friday friends 👋

A noticeably quieter week on the funding announcement front, but thankfully, plenty happening elsewhere to make up for it. Not least the long-awaited announcement that noon payments is selling 65% of its business to NEOPAY, a deal we first put to noon back in August. We’ve got a few thoughts on that one, which we'll be sharing in Monday's column.

On the public markets front, we're still wading through MNT-Halan's newly published prospectus, which is something of a nightmare to work through given every page appears to have been scanned, is covered in a bewildering number of corporate stamps, and is entirely in Arabic to boot. Keep our agents in your thoughts this weekend, they’ll be working overtime.

Elsewhere, Endeavor Catalyst closed an oversubscribed $320 million fifth fund, its largest to date. UAE investors, including MGX, are reportedly in discussions to commit as much as $10 billion collectively to OpenAI's latest round, at a mind-boggling $1.4 trillion pre-money valuation. If you were wondering, yes, if it goes ahead at that price, it’d be the highest valuation ever attached to a private funding round.

And then there's Saudi AI company Echelon, which has named East40, RAED Ventures, Avra and Ben Horowitz among its early backers. Founded by Prince Khalid Bin Bader Al Saud, the company remains something of an enigma, but we've done our best to get to the bottom of what it's building in our piece.

On a slightly different note, we hope you've been enjoying the coverage this week, our first with the new, expanded publishing schedule. For those who've missed the memo, here's what you can now expect from us each week:

A particularly exciting milestone for us this week, too, as Wednesday's deep dive marked the first piece we've published from a commissioned external writer. Anmol Irfan did a terrific job unpacking what's been happening in Pakistan's ride-hailing market since Careem's exit, drawing on an enormous amount of original sourcing and first-person interviews. It's exactly the sort of reporting we'd like to do more of, and if you haven't had a chance to read it yet, we'd really encourage you to give it a look.

On the podcast, meanwhile, we sat down with COLABS' Omar Shah for a conversation spanning Saudi Arabia, the economics of coworking, and the realities of building a business across the GCC.

Right, enough from us. This and much (much) more below 👇

This week’s round-up is a 7 min read:

Echelon (🇸🇦 KSA), which helps enterprises and governments deploy AI, has named East40, RAED Ventures, Avra and Ben Horowitz among its early backers. Founded by Prince Khalid Bin Bader Al Saud, it hasn’t disclosed funding amounts or valuation.

Project Suppliers (🇸🇦 KSA), a supplier-sourcing and procurement platform, has raised a $1M pre-Seed from undisclosed angel investors to develop its technology and expand services for construction and industrial businesses.

Yasmina (🇸🇦 KSA), which lets digital platforms embed insurance products via API, has signed an investment agreement with Alinma, which joins as an investor and strategic partner. The deal was announced at Money20/20 and the amount wasn't disclosed.

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

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🇦🇪 NEOPAY has agreed to buy 65% of noon payments, taking control of the e-commerce group’s payments arm and gaining a route into Saudi and Egypt. Terms weren’t disclosed and the deal still needs regulatory and antitrust approval.

NEOPAY is majority-owned by DgPays and Arcapita, which bought control from Mashreq in a deal that valued it at about $385M. The sale comes as noon works toward a listing, although neither company has linked the transaction to IPO preparations.

🌍 Endeavor Catalyst has closed a $320M fifth fund, its largest to date. Jordan’s ISSF committed $7M, while founders of Careem and Checkout.com also joined the LP base. Earlier funds backed regional companies including Tabby, Tamara, Foodics and TruKKer. Catalyst invests alongside other institutional investors in companies led by Endeavor-selected entrepreneurs, without leading rounds or taking board seats. Fund V is already investing, including in Replit, although no specific MENA allocation has been disclosed.

🇦🇪 Phoenix Venture Partners has disclosed an investment in COFE Tech through an undisclosed secondary transaction. Founded in Kuwait in 2018 as a café-ordering app, COFE has since expanded into procurement and commerce software, serving more than 1,000 clients across Saudi, Kuwait and the UAE. PVP’s purchase preceded COFE’s $43M pre-IPO round, and the $178M valuation cited in its announcement belongs to that later financing. Its own purchase price and stake remain undisclosed. PVP founder Steve Khayat has joined the board as COFE prepares for a planned Saudi listing by 2029.

💳 Janus Henderson has reached a $191M second close for its $300M-target MENA Private Credit Fund IV, the fourth private-credit fund from the former NBK Capital Partners team, which it acquired in 2024. The Sharia-compliant vehicle has attracted institutions and family offices from Saudi and the UAE, targeting 10 to 12 investments of $15M to $50M in profitable mid-market businesses. The team previously provided a $10M financing facility to Dubai-based unicorn Moove in 2022.

🇪🇬 MNT-Halan’s Egyptian IPO has been priced at EGP24.50 per share, valuing the local business at EGP39.2B, approximately $750M. That’s below the $900M to $1B bankers were pitching for the Egyptian unit in June, and compares with a $1.4B valuation for the wider group. CEO Mounir Nakhla has said at least half of what the parent raises will return to the listed company through a capital increase of up to EGP4B, with the rest funding Türkiye and an acquisition. The price is fixed, at about 20x 2025 net income against 28.5x for listed peer Valu. Public subscriptions opened on October 7 and run until October 15, with trading expected on October 20.

🇦🇪 UAE funds including MGX are discussing an investment of up to $10B collectively in an OpenAI round seeking at least $30B at a $1.4T pre-money valuation. The price would be the highest ever attached to a private funding round, up from $852B in March, and OpenAI is presenting it as fixed without a lead investor. The raise stands in for an IPO that Sam Altman has pushed to 2027 at the earliest, while Anthropic is targeting a November listing at up to $2T. MGX has backed OpenAI three times already. It joined the 2024 round at $157B, bought into last October’s $6.6B secondary at $500B and co-led March’s $122B round, though it has never disclosed its cheque sizes. It is also an equity partner in the US Stargate venture, and its co-founder G42 is building the 1GW Stargate UAE cluster in Abu Dhabi that OpenAI and Oracle will operate.

🚗 Crescent Enterprises has led myTVS’ $45M Series D through CE-Invests, backing the Indian automotive aftermarket platform as it moves into the UAE and wider MENA. Part of the $3B TVS Mobility Group, myTVS runs more than 1,000 multi-brand garages and supplies 10,000 parts retailers in India. Management guided to about $220M in FY26 revenue, the year it reached EBITDA breakeven. The company is building toward a public listing although no firm timeline has been publicly disclosed.

🇶🇦 PayLater has crossed QAR1B ($275M) in GMV, according to a LinkedIn update from Mohammed Al-Delaimi. He said that volume had been facilitated, settled to merchants and collected back, putting collections on the same footing as transaction growth. The figure is up from QAR300M in its first year of operation. Founded in 2023, PayLater received Qatar Central Bank’s first BNPL licence in early 2025 and closed a $10M seed in January. Its existing lending comes from a QAR100M facility with Qatar Islamic Bank and Al Rayan Bank, and it signed an MOU with Shorooq in February to explore a larger institutional credit line.

🇸🇦 Mnzil, TDG and Capital Partners have launched a real estate fund targeting SAR1B, approx $267M, to build workforce housing for up to 50K workers in Saudi. Mnzil will be the exclusive operator, with TDG developing the compounds and Capital Partners managing the fund. Mnzil raised an $11.7M Series A led by Founders Fund last November, the US firm’s first investment in the Kingdom, with seed backer COTU Ventures also participating. Since then it’s grown from about 100 corporate clients in 13 cities to more than 250 clients and 30K workers housed across 30 cities. The launch comes amid growing investor interest in Saudi workforce housing, with newer rival Rela taking an undisclosed investment from Yazeed Al Rajhi & Brothers Holding last week.

Omar Shah on why COLABS is betting on Saudi, how the economics of coworking actually work, and what it takes to build across the GCC.

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