Happy Friday friends 👋

As much as we've enjoyed covering the twists and turns of the Uber and Delivery Hero will-they-won't-they saga over the past number of months, the fact that it finally appears to be over is something of a relief.

On the surface, the arrangement looks rather neat. DH shareholders get a tidy 127% premium, Germany gets a commitment that Uber will wait three years before (probably) yanking control back Stateside, and Uber carves out the assets it deems most worthwhile, with SSW Partners hoovering up those that could prove regulatory headaches. All seems remarkably amicable, so all's well that ends well, we guess. Will there be another sting in the tail? Probably, but there's a pin in it for now.

Elsewhere, Tabby has wasted very little time putting its newly minted SVF licence to work, launching Tabby Cash, a fee-free spending account already used by more than 150,000 people, as it marches toward becoming "a place where people have full control over their money." For more on the idea of BNPL as, always, a customer acquisition strategy in service of Tabby's grander vision, our previous deep dive on how the company bootstrapped customer acquisition is as good a place as any to start.

Next week's schedule will look a little different as FWDstart's founders sign a nuptial MOU, so you can expect one of our favourite deep dives we've ever put together on Wednesday, but that'll be all from us. Normal service resumes thereafter.

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This and much more below 👇

This week’s round-up is a 5 min read:

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

Think (🇸🇦 KSA), an AI infrastructure company building hardware and software to make GPU compute cheaper and more efficient, has raised $8M in a pre-Seed round, co-led by RAED Ventures and Wa'ed Ventures, with participation from Dhahran Techno Valley's VC arm and angel investors.

Mylerz (🇪🇬 Egypt), a last-mile e-commerce delivery and fulfilment company providing shipment management tech for merchants, has raised $2M in debt and equity funding, led by Lorax Capital Partners, with participation from Fawry and existing shareholders.

Floaty Studio (🇸🇦 KSA), a Riyadh-based indie mobile game studio building casual, hybrid-casual games including its title PLATE, and a graduate of NEOM's Level Up Accelerator, has raised $1M, backed by Merak Capital through its Merak Gaming Fund (MGF).

AlMkhtar (🇸🇾 Syria), a digital marketplace for real estate and automotive listings, has raised $100K in a Seed round, led by angel investors Rani Abu-Shaar and Abdulah Al-Shamma, with additional angel participation.

🍔 Uber has agreed a €13B ($14.8B) takeover of Delivery Hero at €41.50 per share, with both boards backing the offer and Prosus irrevocably committing to tender its 16.68% stake, lifting Uber's economic interest past 53%. For MENA the outcome is unambiguous: Talabat's eight markets and Saudi Arabia's HungerStation both transfer to Uber, settling months of speculation involving DoorDash and Ninja. Delivery Hero's businesses in 14 markets where Uber Eats already operates go to SSW Partners for €1.4B. The price represents a 127% premium to the unaffected three-month average before Uber's pursuit became public in May. Closing is expected in the second half of 2027, subject to regulatory clearances.

💳 Tabby has launched Tabby Cash, a fee-free spending account with cashback and free local transfers, its first product built on the UAE Stored Value Facilities licence secured in April. More than 150,000 people are already using the account, which offers 3% cashback for Tabby Plus subscribers and arrives alongside a rebrand positioning the company around money management rather than BNPL. The launch completes a two-market build-out: consumer and SME lending licences in Saudi Arabia, deposits and spending in the UAE. Tabby, MENA's most valuable fintech at $4.5B, now reports more than $18B in annualised sales volume, up from $10B+ at the start of the year.

🪙 Revolut has received in-principle approval from Dubai's VARA for a crypto licence, clearing a path to offer broker-dealer, exchange, and management and investment services in the UAE. The approval stacks a second regulatory pillar under Revolut's UAE build-out, a month after it completed Central Bank licensing for payments. Services would run through the retail app and Revolut X, its standalone exchange, under local entity Revolut Digital Assets FZE headed by Joseph Khair. Revolut serves more than 16 million crypto customers globally and is weighing a secondary share sale at a $115B valuation. A UAE launch date has not been announced.

🤖 Vercel has acquired Stakpak, the DevOps AI agent startup founded by Egyptian engineer George Fahmy, as the $9.3B company behind Next.js builds out what it calls agentic infrastructure. Stakpak bootstrapped out of Cairo for two years before raising a $500K pre-seed led by P1 Ventures in early 2025, evolving from an AI-powered infrastructure-as-code IDE into an autonomous DevOps agent that cut four-hour tasks to 50 minutes. Vercel, whose ARR hit a $340M run rate in February, has been on an acquisition run including NuxtLabs and Better Auth. Terms were not disclosed.

🇦🇪 Dubai Future District Fund has invested in Isometric's $40M Series A, backing the AI certification platform founded by Eamon Jubbawy, who previously built and sold identity verification company Onfido for roughly $650M. Isometric's AI agents automate industrial certification, from carbon removal to low-carbon materials, cutting processes that took months to hours, with clients including Microsoft, Boeing and JPMorganChase. The round was led by AVP with AXA as anchor, alongside Plural, Lowercarbon Capital and John Doerr.

🎮 JIMCO participated in Turkish gaming startup Bold Games' $6M Seed round, backing the Istanbul studio behind sort puzzle game Market Match. The round was led by Arcadia Gaming Partners, Makers Fund and e2vc. Bold Games was founded by veterans of Türkiye's gaming scene including alumni of Dream Games, Bigger Games, Rollic and ZeptoLab, targeting the sort puzzle genre as a less saturated alternative to hyper-casual.

After nearly a decade leading Deliveroo’s Middle East operation, Anis Harb left to help business make AI work at scale. We sit down with the Algebra AI founder, fresh from a $7M raise, to talk managed AI services, leaner teams and the gap between a promising demo and measurable results.

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