UAE customer intelligence startup Cobi raises $1M pre-seed led by Lunara Partners

Dubai-based customer intelligence startup Cobi has closed a $1 million pre-seed round led by Lunara Partners, with participation from Plug and Play, Annex Investments and Spring. The funding will be used to expand enterprise deployments across the Middle East and internationally, and to further develop Cobi’s recommendation and decisioning capabilities. Cobi was founded in 2024 by CEO Darren Edmund and CTO Botlhale Mosoane and positions itself as an “intelligence layer” that connects customer data collection systems with customer engagement systems.

“The person who spends the most with you isn't necessarily the person with the strongest loyalty or brand affinity,” Edmund said, arguing that many existing customer-data systems still reduce relationships to transactions, segments and scores.

Cobi’s platform aggregates behavioural, transactional, product and engagement signals that are typically spread across different tools. It identifies changes in customer behaviour, offers explanations for what may be driving those changes and recommends a next action. The startup targets what it calls the gap between data collection and execution — a space where customer signals are spread across multiple systems and often reconciled manually before teams decide how to respond.

Contracts and early customers

• Cobi recently signed a five-year agreement with eNovate, a subsidiary of Egypt’s state-linked eFinance Investment Group, to integrate its technology across eNovate’s digital payments ecosystem.
• The company has also worked with Mastercard, Emirates Flight Catering, Presight AI and Lari Exchange on applications for its customer-intelligence technology.

The $1 million round is among the early investments from Lunara Partners, the MENA-focused investment firm co-founded by Said Murad and Omar Alkhawaja. Murad previously spent six years as a senior partner at Global Ventures and earlier held operating roles at Jamalon and Groupon UAE. Commenting on the strategic rationale for backing Cobi, Alkhawaja said: “Enterprises have invested heavily in systems that collect customer data and systems that execute interactions, but the decisions connecting them remain fragmented and manual. [Cobi is] the intelligence layer that turns customer signals into clear, measurable action.”

Founders bring complementary experience. Edmund has a decade of experience in data-led digital transformation, having advised European financial institutions at Deloitte and served as chief business officer at fintech dropp. CTO Botlhale Mosoane has experience building and scaling technology across startups and large enterprises, including Amazon Web Services.

Outlook

With the new capital, Cobi plans to accelerate enterprise roll-outs in the Middle East and expand internationally, while enhancing its recommendation and decisioning capabilities to automate and clarify next-best actions for customer-facing teams. The company’s early commercial traction with partners like eNovate and Mastercard provides practical testing grounds for its platform across payments, travel catering and foreign exchange contexts.

As enterprises continue to accumulate customer signals across siloed tools, Cobi aims to position its software as the connective layer that interprets those signals and drives actionable outcomes. The challenge ahead will be scaling integrations across diverse enterprise stacks while proving measurable ROI from its decisioning recommendations to justify broader deployments.