By Startups MENA Staff When a small business needs capital, waiting weeks for a bank decision can mean lost growth—or lost survival. For thousands of […]
Orbii Raises $3.6M to Rebuild SME Lending Infrastructure Across MENA
Riyadh’s newest credit-infrastructure startup aims to make SME lending instant, embedded, and data-driven — transforming a process that has historically been slow, manual, and exclusionary. […]
A Quiet Gold Rush — Now With Angel Backing
In an Egypt where families have long trusted gold more than bank deposits to protect their savings from inflation and currency swings, a new type […]
PAYDAY Raises $3M Pre-Seed to Redefine Worker Financial Wellness in Tunisia
A Problem Hiding in Plain Sight When Tunisian founders Mohamed Anouar Gadhoum and Shaher Abbas launched PAYDAY in 2024, they weren’t chasing a trend — they were solving a chronic and […]
HALA Secures $157M Series B in One of the Middle East’s Largest Fintech Rounds
A Milestone Moment for Regional Fintech When co-founders Esam Alnahdi and Maher Loubieh launched HALA, their mission was simple but ambitious: give micro, small, and […]
Dubai’s Gainz Raises 7-Figure Pre-Seed to Fast-Track Sharia-Compliant SME Lending
For small and medium businesses across the GCC that can wait months for a bank loan, a Dubai-based fintech is betting that funding should arrive […]
Talk, Don’t Click: Saudi’s Humain Unveils Voice-First OS and a 6GW AI Data Centre Push
How a PIF-backed “startup” is turning operating systems and infrastructure into Saudi Arabia’s next strategic export. A New Kind of Operating System Out of Riyadh […]
Metric raises fresh capital to put an AI “Chief Financial Officer” in every SME’s pocket
When cafés, clinics, and cloud kitchens across the GCC ask “Can we afford to expand next quarter?”, many still reach for spreadsheets. Metric, an Abu Dhabi–headquartered AI […]
Egypt’s Intella Raises $12.5m to Build the Voice Layer for the Arabic Internet
Egyptian-founded, Saudi-headquartered Intella is betting that Arabic dialects aren’t a “localisation problem” for global AI, but the foundation of a new regional infrastructure play. A […]
MENA Startup Funding Falls to $785m in October — But the Real Story Is Debt and Early-Stage Resilience
When a founder in Dubai refreshed her inbox on 3 November, the headline was hard to miss: “MENA startup funding drops to $785 million in October, […]