UAE-founded global employment and payroll platform RemotePass has raised $17.4 million in a Series B led by EBRD Venture Capital, with participation from 500 Global and existing investors Oraseya Capital, 212 VC, Access Bridge Ventures and Khwarizmi Ventures. Earlier backers in prior rounds include BECO Capital, Endeavor Catalyst and Wamda Capital.

Founded in late 2020 by Kamal Reggad and Karim Nadi, RemotePass enables businesses to onboard, manage and pay employees and contractors in more than 150 countries, with a particular strength in MENA markets where most global competitors have limited payment rails and no Arabic-language support.

The company originally launched as SafarPass, a corporate travel management platform, before pivoting when the pandemic collapsed business travel. Reggad, who was already running an 18-person remote team across the UAE, Africa and Europe, redirected the company toward the cross-border employment infrastructure he had been navigating firsthand. Clients now include Tabby, Careem, Logitech, Tata Group and InDrive.

RemotePass said it reached profitability in early 2025 before deliberately reinvesting into expansion, and has scaled to more than 35,000 workers across 150 countries, facilitating over $800 million in cross-border payroll.

In late 2025, the company launched SpendCards, embedding corporate expense cards into the same platform that handles payroll and contractor payments.

The Series B will fund expansion into Europe and the US, deeper compliance infrastructure in existing markets and continued investment in AI and embedded fintech products.

The round follows a $5.5 million Series A led by 212 VC in March 2024, and an undisclosed pre-Series A in 2021 led by BECO Capital with Wamda and Khwarizmi.

EBRD's Amine Chabane said RemotePass had reached "meaningful scale on a fraction of the capital others in the category have raised," a reference to global competitors like Deel (valued at $12 billion) and Remote (valued at $3 billion) that have raised hundreds of millions to build similar infrastructure from the US and Europe rather than from emerging markets outward.

Jordan Capital and Investment Fund (JCIF), the JOD 275 million ($388 million) vehicle owned by Jordan's commercial and Islamic banks, has launched Manara Ventures, a JOD 50 million ($70.5 million) scale-up fund for Jordanian technology companies.

The fund also secured backing from regional investors including Abu Dhabi-based Lunate, the $115 billion investment firm controlled by companies associated with Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and is domiciled in ADGM as a fully Sharia-compliant vehicle.

Luma Fawaz, formerly CEO of Oasis500 where she oversaw more than 180 early-stage investments and worked with over 2,500 entrepreneurs across the region, has been appointed CEO of Manara Ventures.

The fund will invest $750,000 to $3 million in more than 20 growth-stage Jordanian technology and tech-enabled companies, with additional capital reserved to support up to 15 high-performing portfolio companies pursuing regional expansion.

The launch represents JCIF's first move into venture capital after deploying over JOD 100 million across six Jordanian companies since it began investing in 2023, including stakes in Aqaba Digital Hub (a Tier III data centre and cable landing station in the southern port city), dairy manufacturer Al-Shaikh Cheese, poultry processor Al Jazeera Agriculture and edtech platform Jo Academy, whose $28 million round JCIF anchored alongside Saudi Arabia's Rua Growth Fund.

Jordan has long produced tech companies disproportionate to the size of its domestic market, from Maktoob to OpenSooq, Tarjama and Tamatem, but growth-stage capital within the Kingdom has remained scarce, leaving most Jordanian founders dependent on Gulf or international investors for their Series A and beyond.

Manara Ventures will hope to fill that gap from within, with Lunate's involvement providing a direct bridge between Jordanian startups and Abu Dhabi's institutional capital ecosystem.

Uber has more than doubled its stake in Delivery Hero from roughly 7% to about 19.5%, becoming the largest shareholder in the Berlin-listed food delivery group, Reuters reported on Monday citing a company announcement and LSEG data.

The stake is worth around €1.7 billion at current prices, and Uber also holds options for a further 5.6% of the shares, which would give it a blocking minority.

The company said in a regulatory filing that it does not currently intend to raise its stake above 30%, the threshold that would trigger a mandatory offer to the rest of the register. Delivery Hero shares closed 5.6% higher on the news.

Uber's existing position on the Delivery Hero register dates to May 2024, when it agreed a $300 million share purchase alongside its $950 million bid for Delivery Hero's Foodpanda Taiwan business. Taiwanese regulators blocked the acquisition on competition grounds, and Uber paid a $250 million break fee when the deal formally terminated in March 2025, but the share-purchase agreement survived the collapse of the underlying transaction. Delivery Hero subsequently sold Foodpanda Taiwan to Grab in March 2026 for $600 million, $350 million less than Uber's original offer.

Most of the additional block on Monday came through purchases from Prosus, which is required by the European Commission to reduce its Delivery Hero holding to below 10% by late summer as a condition of its acquisition of Just Eat Takeaway. Uber had already taken a 4.5% block from Prosus in April for €270 million, and the 19.5% position disclosed on Monday reflects further accumulation from both Prosus and the broader market.

The move arrives six days after Delivery Hero confirmed that its co-founder and chief executive Niklas Östberg would step down by 31 March 2027, following an eight-week public campaign by Hong Kong activist fund Aspex Management. Aspex itself raised its stake to about 15% on 11 May, having pushed Delivery Hero to identify all assets where it is "not the best owner and operator" and to sell them through "competitive sales processes" rather than bilateral deals.

Delivery Hero's AGM is scheduled for 23 June. With the Prosus stake non-voting until disposed of, Aspex at 15% and Uber now at 19.5%, the practical voting register at that AGM is structurally different from anything Delivery Hero has previously faced.

Delivery Hero said it "welcomes Uber's additional investment as a further endorsement of its platform and Everyday App strategy". JPMorgan analysts said the move was "a clear endorsement of the strategic attractiveness of Delivery Hero's asset base for Uber", while noting that "Uber's ultimate intentions on further stake-building remain unclear".

For MENA, the implications could be interesting. Uber owns 100% of Careem Rides, the ride-hailing business it acquired for $3.1 billion in 2019, and retains a significant minority stake in Careem Technologies, the super-app business that operates Careem's food delivery, grocery and payments services across ten regional markets and is 50.03% owned by e&. Uber itself exited direct food delivery in MENA in May 2020, when it shuttered Uber Eats across Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE and folded the regional operations into Careem.

Uber's 19.5% stake gives it a structural position on any potential MENA disposal that comes out of the strategic review, with HungerStation the simpler candidate given that talabat sits on the DFM with a 20% minority float. Whether Uber would actually want either asset is a different question, given its existing exposure through the Careem super app.

Mal, the Abu Dhabi-based fintech founded by Abdallah Abu-Sheikh, has received in-principle approval from the Central Bank of the UAE to establish a licensed bank in the Emirates.

The decision marks the first formal regulatory step on the path to a full banking licence, and follows the $230 million seed round Mal closed in January, the largest fintech seed round on record in MEA, led by Hazem Ben-Gacem's BlueFive Capital.

In-principle approval doesn't authorise Mal to take deposits or operate as a bank, and CBUAE rules give applicants one year from issuance to satisfy the remaining conditions on capital, governance, and operational systems before a full licence can be granted. Mal has not disclosed an expected launch date.

The approval places Mal among a small but growing list of independent digital banking entrants licensed by the CBUAE. Earlier comparators include Wio Bank, the ADQ-, Alpha Dhabi-, e&- and First Abu Dhabi Bank-backed neobank that launched in 2022, and Zand Bank, which received its full CBUAE licence in mid-2022 with backing from a private consortium including Emaar founder Mohamed Alabbar, Franklin Templeton, Aditya Birla Group, and Lulu Group's Yusuff Ali.

Most other UAE neobanks (Liv, Mashreq Neo, YAP) operate as products of incumbent banks or under partnership-based licences rather than as separately licensed institutions. Revolut, by contrast, received CBUAE in-principle approval in September 2025 for payments licences rather than a banking licence.

Abu-Sheikh, in a statement, said the company was "working hard to launch the world's leading Islamic digital bank from the UAE." The positioning is consistent with how Mal characterised itself when announcing the January seed, though the company has yet to publicly disclose product specifics, target launch markets beyond the UAE, or a defined competitive frame.

Industry estimates of the global Islamic finance market vary, with Mal and several other Islamic fintech entrants citing a $7 trillion figure. Either way, the existing asset base is concentrated in conventional Islamic banks and takaful providers in Saudi Arabia, the wider Gulf, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Iran, rather than in cross-border digital institutions.

A small number of Sharia-compliant neobanks currently operate at scale globally, mostly in Southeast Asia, including Indonesia's Hijra Bank and Bank Aladin, and Malaysia's Be U (by Bank Islam) and Al Rajhi Bank Malaysia's digital arm.

Mal's stated rollout will begin in the UAE before expanding into the wider Middle East and Asia. The company has not named specific Asian target markets, though the largest pools of Muslim consumers outside the Gulf sit in Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Malaysia, each of which already hosts a mature local Islamic banking sector.

Mal Bank, the entity that will hold the UAE licence, is intended to sit within a broader group structure the company says will eventually span wealth, payments, and embedded finance.

Abu-Sheikh is best known regionally as the former CEO of Astra Tech, the G42-backed group whose consumer products, including PayBy, Rizek, and Botim, reach more than 150 million users across 155 countries. He exited Astra Tech in November 2024, selling his entire stake to existing shareholder G42, which took effective control of the group. Long Ruan, the group's CTO and co-founder, stepped in as interim CEO of Astra Tech.

Mal's leadership team has previously been disclosed as including former executives from Revolut and Nubank.

Peekabox, a Dubai-based surplus food marketplace, has closed an oversubscribed $1.5 million angel-backed seed round to launch an app connecting consumers with unsold food from restaurants, cafes, bakeries and grocery stores at discounts of 50 to 70%.

The company's board is chaired by Dr Sameer Al Ansari, former chairman and CEO of Dubai International Capital, with advisors including the CEOs of Meta MEA, Nestlé MENA and Max Fashion, the majority of whom are also investors.

Founded by brothers Hasan Sarwar (CEO) and Omair Sarwar (COO), both former investment bankers in Dubai, Peekabox has signed partnerships with 20 brands whose combined UAE store network exceeds 1,000 locations, including Carrefour, Costa Coffee, Tim Hortons, Dunkin', Krispy Kreme, Paul, Eataly, Cinnabon, Pret a Manger, Armani Cafe and Union Coop, through franchise groups including Majid Al Futtaim, Apparel Group, Azadea, Cravia, Americana and Emirates Leisure Retail.

Of those 20 brands, 16 are live on the app today across 200 active store locations, deliberately staggered to ensure quality rather than scaling ahead of operational readiness, with the remaining locations being activated in phases.

Customers reserve surprise boxes through the app and collect them in-store within a fixed pickup window. The company told FWDstart that every store location sits within an existing high-footfall catchment, from residential communities and shopping malls to DIFC and Business Bay, targeting young professionals on their commute, families looking to reduce grocery spend and mall workers picking up an end-of-day box from a store they're already standing next to.

The model replicates what Too Good To Go has scaled to 19 countries, 120 million registered users and 500 million meals saved in Europe and North America, but in a market where the global leader has only a minimal presence through 11 Lagardère Travel Retail outlets in Abu Dhabi.

The UAE wastes more than AED 6 billion ($1.6 billion) worth of food annually according to Ne'ma, the national food loss and waste initiative, which has set a target to halve food waste by 2030 in line with the UN sustainable development goals.

The funding will go toward GTM in the UAE, including marketing, operations and a lean execution team. Following deeper rollout across Dubai, Peekabox plans to expand across the GCC with Saudi Arabia as the next priority, where the company says the addressable surplus food volume is 4.1 million tonnes across more than 137,000 stores.

Tamara Finance Company, the SAMA-licensed Saudi subsidiary of BNPL operator Tamara, reported a 210% rise in revenue and a near-fivefold increase in net profit in the first quarter, driven by the scaling of its new Islamic financing product.

Revenue reached SAR 670 million ($179 million) in the three months to 31 March, up from SAR 216 million a year earlier, according to consolidated interim financial information reviewed by PwC. Net profit was SAR 123 million ($33 million), up 378% from SAR 26 million.

Islamic financing revenue contributed SAR 182 million ($49 million) in the quarter and now accounts for 27% of the top line. The product, structured under murabaha principles and only enabled by a SAMA consumer financing licence granted in February 2025, didn’t exist in Q1 2025. The single-quarter contribution exceeded the SAR 118 million the line generated across the whole of FY2025.

Merchant network revenue, the commission line that funded Tamara's earlier growth, also rose sharply, up 135% to SAR 421 million.

Inside Tamara's Books

What 40 pages of audited financial statements reveal about how Saudi's first homegrown fintech unicorn rebuilt its revenue model, underwrites a lending book it didn't have twelve months ago, funds it all at rates its nearest competitor can't match, and prepares for what comes next.

The gross consumer loan book grew 33% in the quarter to SAR 5.59 billion ($1.49 billion). Islamic financing receivables now account for 42% of that book, up from 34% at year-end, while pay-in-instalments receivables grew a more modest 17%.

Tamara's senior funding facility, backed by Goldman Sachs, Citi and Apollo and closed at Money 20/20 Middle East in September 2025, was upsized to SAR 5.79 billion ($1.54 billion) during the quarter from SAR 4.45 billion at year-end, with most tranches repriced down by roughly 70 basis points. The facility matures in August 2029.

Net expected credit losses rose to SAR 167 million, against a net SAR 11 million release in Q1 2025, reflecting the rapid expansion of the loan book and the seasoning of newly originated receivables. The share of the book classified as Stage 3, defined as more than 90 days past due, rose to 1.71% at quarter-end from 1.03% at year-end. Write-offs in the quarter totalled SAR 104 million.

In a standalone note added to its accounts, Tamara said the regional security environment has deteriorated significantly since 28 February 2026, affecting "several countries in the Middle East including Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, causing disruption to some business and economic activities." The company said it was "too early for any potential credit impairment to be reflected" in its staging criteria or macroeconomic assumptions and that it would continue to reassess.

Operating expenses rose 39% to SAR 124 million, with service charges to Tamara FZE, the Dubai-based affiliate that houses the group's technology stack, rising to SAR 27 million from SAR 22 million.

The numbers come in the same week as Tabby Financing Company CJSC, Tamara's nearest competitor and the Saudi subsidiary of MENA's most valuable venture-backed fintech, posted comparatively muted Q1 figures, with revenue up 34% and profit up just 4%. Tamara's top line is now 57% larger than Tabby's and its net profit approximately 1.8x larger. FWDstart understands both companies have shelved Tadawul listing plans for the time being due to the current regional geopolitical situation.

The interim financial information was authorised for issue by Tamara's management on 28 April 2026.

Tabby Financing Company CJSC, the SAMA-licensed Saudi subsidiary of BNPL operator Tabby, posted net profit growth of just 4% in the first quarter against a 34% rise in revenue, as a build-out of in-Kingdom operations drove a 73% jump in operating expenses and net expected credit losses rose 2.6x on a larger loan book.

Revenue reached SAR 427 million ($114 million) in the three months to 31 March, up 34% from SAR 319 million a year earlier, according to interim financial statements reviewed by EY. Net profit was SAR 68 million ($18 million), up just 4% from SAR 65 million.

Consumer fee revenue rose 276% year on year to SAR 68 million, accounting for 16% of total revenue against 5.7% in Q1 2025. The line captures charges from Tabby's "snooze" feature, which lets customers defer an instalment by up to a week for a fee, alongside other consumer-side processing charges. Merchant network revenue, the commission Tabby earns at checkout, grew 19% to SAR 354 million.

Consumer fee revenue had already grown 75% in the FY2025 audited accounts, even as the core split-payment product remained free at checkout.

Inside Tabby's Books

What 35 pages of audited financial statements reveal about how MENA's most valuable fintech actually makes money, funds its lending, manages its risk, and plans to outmanoeuvre the regulatory constraints boxing it in.

Net debt stood at SAR 2.58 billion ($689 million) at quarter-end, SAR 520 million ($139 million) above the threshold set by the Saudi Central Bank and the same excess reported at year-end. EY repeated the Emphasis of Matter paragraph it included in the FY2025 audit, drawing attention to the breach.

Tabby drew no new Murabaha funding from Flow Finance I DAC, its Ireland-based bankruptcy-remote funding vehicle, during the quarter, and said it "remains in the process of securing SAMA approval for an increase in its permitted debt ceiling."

The gross consumer loan book grew 15% in the quarter to SAR 3.92 billion ($1.05 billion), crossing $1 billion for the first time. Cash and cash equivalents fell by SAR 211 million to SAR 526 million, with net intercompany financing inflows of SAR 156 million covering the balance of the funding need.

Other general and administrative expenses rose 175% year on year to SAR 68 million. IT and infrastructure costs rose 168% to SAR 26 million, customer support and service centre expenses rose more than ninefold to SAR 25 million, and employee benefits costs grew 78% to SAR 11.5 million.

Tabby attributed the increase in a footnote to a "continuing build-out of in-Kingdom operational, technology and customer-facing capabilities," adding that "functions and infrastructure previously procured from affiliate entities under intercompany service arrangements are progressively being delivered through directly incurred costs."

Royalty and service charges paid to Tabby Technology Ltd, the affiliate that has historically housed the group's intellectual property, fell to SAR 25 million from SAR 26 million a year earlier.

Net expected credit losses charged to the income statement rose 2.6x to SAR 48 million from SAR 18 million, reflecting the larger loan book and ongoing stage migration. Gross ECL charges of SAR 61 million were partly offset by SAR 13 million in recoveries on previously written-off receivables.

Asset quality metrics improved marginally. The share of the loan book classified as Stage 3, defined as more than 90 days past due, fell to 7.72% from 8.07% at year-end. Coverage on the most distressed bucket rose to 56.58% from 56.21%. Total write-offs in the quarter were SAR 33 million.

Tweeq International Financial Company, the SAMA-licensed digital wallet Tabby acquired in September 2024 and suspended in December 2025, remains dormant within the group. The related-party receivable fell to SAR 22 thousand from SAR 41 thousand at year-end. The only transactions in the quarter were a SAR 114 thousand service charge accrual and a SAR 133 thousand settlement.

The interim financial statements were authorised for issue by Tabby's board on 27 April 2026.

Figures converted at SAR 3.75 = $1. Based on Tabby Financing Company CJSC's reviewed condensed interim IFRS financial statements for the three months ended 31 March 2026.

Thirty-nine Bangladeshi commercial banks have pooled around $35 million to launch the country's first joint institutional venture capital fund, addressing a chronic shortage of late-seed and Series A capital that has forced local founders to raise almost entirely from abroad.

The fund, called Onkur and intended as the first of a planned series, is managed by Bangladesh Startup Investment Company Limited (BSIC), a new vehicle formed under the guidance of Bangladesh Bank and chaired by Mashrur Arefin, who is also chief executive of City Bank and chairman of the Association of Bankers Bangladesh.

BSIC plans to make its first three investments in the fourth quarter of 2026. Initial capital totals 425 crore BDT, with Arefin telling the launch audience the fund expects to grow to around 600 crore BDT (roughly $50 million) once the local subsidiaries of foreign banks complete their participation, which has been delayed by legal complications around equity holdings at their head offices.

The vehicle consolidates a 2021 regulatory requirement that commercial banks allocate at least 1% of net profits annually to startup financing, an obligation that had previously sat fragmented across dozens of institutions with limited appetite or in-house expertise to deploy it. Annual top-ups from participating banks' profits will compound the capital base over time.

(Disclosure: FWDstart attended the BSIC launch in Dhaka at the company's invitation.)

BSIC's governance is structured in four layers. A local investment team handles sourcing on the ground, an investment committee made up of venture capital practitioners assesses deals, an advisory committee links global expertise to the board, and the board of directors itself represents the shareholder banks.

Initial board members come from City Bank, Prime Bank, Mutual Trust Bank, Sonali Bank, and Pubali Bank, alongside independent directors. BSIC has added Dinar Ahmed, a partner at Canada's BDC Capital (which runs a venture programme backed by Canadian banks and provides the closest international precedent for the BSIC model), to the investment committee. Sami Ahmad, a general partner at Eduardo Saverin's $11 billion B Capital, has joined the advisory board.

Rahat Ahmed, founder and managing partner of Anchorless Bangladesh and an advisor to BSIC, used his launch presentation to position the fund within a longer capital ladder rather than as a standalone vehicle.

At the bottom of the chain sits the government-run iDEA project under the ICT ministry, which seeds ideation-stage entrepreneurs. Above it are the international accelerators that have begun operating in the country, including 500 Global, Orbit Startups, and Plug and Play. The seed tier then runs through Startup Bangladesh, a $33 million fund-of-funds operated under the ICT division and backed by Japan's JICA. BSIC slots in above that layer, targeting companies that have outgrown accelerator cheques but lack a credible domestic source of growth capital, leaving founders to fly to Dubai, Singapore, or Silicon Valley for $2 to $5 million rounds. Ahmed framed BSIC's role as providing the missing middle tier in that chain.

Rahat Ahmed, Founder & Managing Partner at Anchorless Bangladesh, and Consultant to BSIC, laying out the operating model of the fund at the launching ceremony in Dhaka on May 12, 2026

The size of the gap is well-documented, despite Bangladesh's demographic fundamentals making it the kind of market international venture investors would otherwise be expected to focus on. The country has 178 million people, a median age of 26, and a trajectory toward becoming the world's ninth-largest consumer market by 2030. Bangladeshi startups raised $124 million in 2025, according to a report from Dhaka-based VC firm LightCastle Partners, but the vast majority of that figure came from a single transaction, the $110 million merger between B2B commerce platform ShopUp and Saudi Arabia-based Sary. Just 1% of last year's total came from local investors.

Arefin used his own remarks to lay out the longer historical picture, namely that roughly $1.1 billion of venture capital has ever been deployed into Bangladeshi startups, of which around $950 million came from foreign sources including Peak XV (formerly Sequoia Capital India), Wavemaker Partners, VentureSouq, Conjunction Capital, Openspace Ventures, Golden Gate Ventures, IFC Venture Capital, Grab, and Sturgeon Capital. Domestic capital has contributed somewhere in the region of only $150 million across the entire history of the ecosystem.

A third pool of capital BSIC is targeting, alongside its own bank-shareholder commitments and the foreign capital it hopes to attract, is the country's family wealth, which has largely sat on the sidelines of venture financing to date. Ahmed argued in his launch presentation that the banks backing the fund are institutions wealthy Bangladeshi families already trust, and that the structure therefore gives local capital a credible process through which to invest alongside professionally managed venture capital for the first time. The expectation is that a $5 million round into a BSIC portfolio company could be topped up by family-office capital co-investing through the same diligence framework, increasing local participation in rounds that would otherwise be entirely foreign-led.

BSIC is not the first attempt at domestic institutional venture in Bangladesh, however, and the country has a record of locally-backed venture vehicles that have failed to deliver returns or sustain follow-on rounds.

Bangladesh Bank Governor Md. Mostaqur Rahman acknowledged that history at the launch himself, conceding that the central bank's first dedicated startup financing facility, a Tk 500 crore vehicle set up in 2021, "was not very successful," and that the subsequent 1% directive on commercial bank profits had created the raw material for BSIC but not, on its own, the mechanism to deploy it.

Saiyed Mahbubur Rahman, chief executive of Mutual Trust Bank and a BSIC board member, broadened the point on the launch panel. "In Bangladesh there are a couple of venture capital funds that were here. The local ones also were established by some institutional investors and we have seen them not being successful," Rahman said.

His framing of the operational challenge was that BSIC will need to choose between doing this "quickly or well," and that the credibility of the fund will rest on the discipline of its first investments. Rahman flagged that BSIC's success would depend on hiring leadership with what he called "dual fluency," able to speak the language of 39 bank shareholders subject to assets-and-liabilities thinking and the language of venture-stage founders working on much longer horizons with materially higher tolerance for failure. "I'm not sure whether that individual exists in the market in Bangladesh," Rahman said. "But we need to find them."

A related structural question for any fund whose capital comes entirely from regulated banks is whether the investment vehicle will operate as venture capital or as a lending book in disguise. Bangladesh Bank executive director Husne Ara Shikha addressed the point at the launch, committing to allow BSIC the operational flexibility to use convertible notes, SAFEs, and equity instruments rather than forcing the fund into conventional banking products.

The central bank has also designated a Tk 500 crore (around $42 million) non-dilutive working capital facility that BSIC portfolio companies will be able to access at concessional rates, giving founders a debt option for scaling without further dilution, and has put in place share swap mechanisms designed to make it easier for foreign-incorporated companies with Bangladeshi operations to redomicile.

Foreign banks operating in Bangladesh have not yet joined BSIC directly, with the central bank indicating their participation will route through capacity-building work (skill development, incubator support, and ecosystem programmes) rather than direct equity until the legal complications are worked through.

BSIC has also been built to insulate decisions from the political pressures that have historically complicated state-adjacent capital in Bangladesh. Amir Khasru Mahmud Chowdhury, the country's finance minister, told the launch audience the fund would not be subject to political interference, and Arefin said the minister had personally instructed him to push back on any politically connected founders attempting to lean on the fund.

Tanveer Ali, independent director of Startup Bangladesh Limited (which runs the JICA-backed fund of funds at the seed tier of the capital ladder), used his panel remarks to recast the funding-gap problem in terms foreign investors actually face. Foreign investors looking at Bangladesh, he noted, are simultaneously looking at twenty to thirty other countries and hundreds, if not thousands, of companies, meaning Bangladeshi founders are competing not just against each other for capital but against the global investable universe. "We're sometimes comparing ourselves more insularly," Ali said, arguing that BSIC's most useful function may be the signal it sends to foreign LPs that a credible local co-investor exists, rather than the absolute size of the fund itself.

Panel discussion – "Catalyzing Institutional Capital for Bangladesh's Next Growth Wave" – ONKUR Bangladesh Fund I launch, Dhaka, May 2026. Moderated by Bijon Islam (LightCastle Partners), the session featured Tammer Qaddumi (VentureSouq), Shiv Choudhury (Wavemaker Growth), Shahir Chowdhury (Shikho), Syed Mahbubur Rahman (Mutual Trust Bank), Mohammad Ali (Pubali Bank), Tanveer Ali (Startup Bangladesh Limited), and Husne Ara Shikha (Bangladesh Bank).

The structural piece no one at the launch claimed to have solved is exits. Shiv Choudhary, a partner at Singapore-based Wavemaker Partners, which has been an investor in Bangladesh for almost five years (Shikho, GoZayaan and Tiger New Energy), said on the panel that the missing layer is not seed or growth capital but liquidity. "If there is an ecosystem that works towards exits and possibilities in capital markets or private equity investments, that's when we get really excited," Choudhary said. He flagged capital market reform, particularly for small and medium enterprises, as the next structural piece the country needs to build. He also warned against BSIC accidentally undoing one of Bangladesh's existing advantages, namely the capital efficiency of its startups, by deploying too liberally. "You don't want it to become the other way," he said, referencing the over-funded ecosystems in some other emerging markets that have struggled to produce returns.

Tammer Qaddumi, co-founder and GP of Dubai-based VentureSouq, which led the $12 million pre-Series B round for logistics and ride-hailing firm Pathao and was on the Saudi side of the ShopUp-Sary merger, flagged two further structural risks. The first is selection discipline. "What you don't want this to be is an entitlement to anyone who wants to start a company," Qaddumi said. "The people approaching it should not treat them like a government agency obligated to give them money." The second is harder to design around. Venture returns require an exit, and the banks backing BSIC may eventually find themselves as shareholders in startups attempting to take market share from their core businesses. "We are actually trying to find companies that are going to take market share away from these stakeholders," Qaddumi said. "That tension is going to be something very, very hard to manage."

Qaddumi also reframed what BSIC is actually trying to produce over the longer term. Venture capital's structural payoff is not the investment phase but the exit phase, and the bigger long-term effect of producing successful companies in any market is the talent dispersion that follows. "Hewlett Packard is known to be the origin of almost all of Silicon Valley," Qaddumi said. "Intel had a similar effect. And more recently PayPal, they call it the PayPal mafia... we saw it in our region with Careem." Pathao and ShopUp, in his reading, are not just two successful companies but the seed conditions for the next generation of Bangladeshi founders. Qaddumi warned the audience against the internally-focused view of what those companies represent. Their value is partly that they have already pushed beyond Bangladesh, with Pathao operating in Nepal and ShopUp now controlling the merged Saudi entity, and the next champions, Qaddumi said, will be those that use the domestic market as a launch pad rather than as a destination.

The launch drew a heavy foreign VC contingent. General partners and investment leads from VentureSouq (UAE), Wavemaker Partners (Singapore), Orbit Startups (Singapore), 500 Global (Malaysia), GFR Fund (Singapore), Conjunction Capital (UAE), and ADB Ventures attended. Several of those funds are already active in Bangladesh.

BSIC's own projections for the fund's impact are aggressive. Ahmed forecast at the launch that the $35 million of initial capital will catalyse roughly $500 million in follow-on funding into BSIC-backed companies, create 15,000 indirect jobs, improve five million livelihoods, and generate $2 billion of cumulative economic value and $250 million in tax revenue over a ten-year horizon. The targeted multiplier on the original deployment is 40x. Hitting those numbers will depend on factors largely outside BSIC's control, including the willingness of foreign capital to keep showing up for Series A rounds in Bangladesh, the development of public market exit options Choudhary flagged, and the basic question of how many genuinely venture-scale companies the ecosystem can produce in any given cohort.

For founders on the ground, the signal from BSIC may matter as much as the capital itself. Shahir Chowdhury, founder of edtech startup Shikho, which is currently raising its Series A round and has previously raised from Wavemaker, Silicon Valley's Learn Capital, and Goodwater Capital (each writing their first cheque into Bangladesh), said the fund could "act as a catalyst to get a lot of foreign venture capitalists looking at Series A companies. If the 10 to 12 of us who are ready for Series A can get funded, it builds that momentum." Chowdhury framed BSIC less as a source of capital and more as the institutional credibility that Bangladeshi founders need when selling their market to foreign investors.

The harder test will ultimately be whether 39 commercial banks accustomed to assets-and-liabilities discipline can sit comfortably with the longer holding periods, structured equity instruments, and higher failure rates that venture capital actually demands. For now, Bangladesh's domestic institutional capital is being routed deliberately, for the first time, into the part of the funding ladder where its founders have most consistently fallen off.

Cerebras Systems shares closed at $311 on their first day of trading on Thursday, up 68% from the $185 IPO price and briefly touching $385 before trading was halted for volatility, giving the AI chipmaker a market capitalisation of nearly $70 billion.

The company raised $5.5 billion in the biggest IPO of the year, according to the Financial Times, after bankers raised the expected offering price several times to meet demand.

The valuation leap over the course of the last twelve months is significant. Cerebras was valued at $8.1 billion in its Series G less than a year ago and $23 billion in its Series H in February. At $70 billion it sits alongside General Motors and NXP, and the market response will sharpen expectations for the expected IPOs of OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX later this year.

As FWDstart reported last month, the IPO filing revealed that 86% of Cerebras's 2025 revenue still came from two Abu Dhabi entities, G42 (24%) and the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (62%), while US-billed revenue actually declined 34% year-on-year.

The FT noted that the company's deals with OpenAI ($20 billion multi-year agreement), AWS, Meta, Mistral, Cognition and Windsurf "should help to reduce its reliance" on the UAE customers. CEO Andrew Feldman played down the concentration risk, telling the FT that the AWS partnership alone opens the door to thousands of corporate clients.

Cerebras was founded more than a decade ago by Feldman and CTO Sean Lie. Its wafer-scale engine uses entire sheets of silicon to produce a chip 58 times larger than Nvidia's GPUs, eliminating the need to link smaller chips together and offering speed advantages for the inference workloads that have become critical as AI tools scale to millions of users.

The IPO landed on a day when both Nvidia and Broadcom hit all-time highs, valued at $5.7 trillion and $2.1 trillion respectively.

Qatar Science & Technology Park (QSTP), the innovation hub within Qatar Foundation, has launched a $30 million Tech Venture Fund targeting early-stage deep tech startups headquartered in Qatar, alongside an inaugural cohort of co-investment partners that includes Global Ventures, Golden Gate Ventures, White Star Capital, VentureSouq and Builders VC.

QSTP will operate a co-investment model rather than leading rounds, investing alongside VC firms with sector expertise at pre-seed, seed and Series A follow-on stages. Portfolio companies must be headquartered in Qatar with core leadership and operations based locally.

The fund will focus on sectors where deep tech intersects with climate, health, education, agriculture, smart infrastructure and mobility, and requires startups to demonstrate measurable social or climate impact alongside commercial potential. Additional co-investment partners will be announced in the coming weeks.

The new fund follows QSTP's first vehicle, which deployed over $20 million across more than 150 startups including several of Qatar's earliest startup successes. The step up to $30 million with formalised VC co-investment partnerships reflects the broader institutional buildout of Qatar's venture ecosystem over the past 18 months.

QIA expanded its Fund of Funds programme from $1 billion to $3 billion at Web Summit Qatar in February, bringing in firms including Speedinvest, Greycroft, Ion Pacific, Liberty City Ventures and Shorooq, each establishing Doha offices.

Saudi-headquartered healthtech Aumet has raised $12 million in a Series A led by Riyadh-based Emkan Capital, with participation from Qatar Development Bank, Azerbaijan's SABAH VC and Japan/Singapore-based AAIC, alongside existing investors Shorooq and Right Side Capital Management. Strategic healthcare investors Cigalah Group and Salehiya Trading Company also joined.

The round follows a $7 million pre-Series A in March 2023 from AAIC, AIJ Holdings, Cigalah and Shorooq, bringing total funding to approximately $20 million.

Founded in 2016 by Yahya Aqel, Adel Haddad Shahed Jaber, Aumet started as a marketplace connecting pharmacies with pharmaceutical distributors and has evolved into what the company describes as an AI-first procurement operating system for healthcare. The platform now processes over $1 billion in GMV annually, facilitates more than five million transactions a year and connects over 12,000 pharmacies across Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia with more than 1,000 pharmaceutical suppliers.

The most significant deployment to date has been in Jordan's public healthcare system. Aumet's enterprise platform was first installed at Al-Basheer Hospital, the country's largest, in collaboration with Jordan's Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Digital Economy and Entrepreneurship. It has since expanded to 32 hospitals, more than 500 medical centres and 18 medical warehouses. Haddad told Qatar's TASMU programme that the system reduced medication waste at Al-Basheer, translating into over $3.2 million in savings in a single year. Aumet has also signed an agreement with Presight, the G42-backed Abu Dhabi AI company, to scale the procurement system across public healthcare networks in the UAE.

"Healthcare supply chains don't suffer from lack of supply, they suffer from lack of intelligence," said Aqel. The funding will go toward expanding AI capabilities including demand forecasting, inventory optimisation and automated purchasing workflows, scaling enterprise deployments across the GCC and entering new markets.

TruKKer, the digital freight network backed by Investcorp, Mubadala and ADQ, has closed a facility of up to $300 million with Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank that lets it borrow against unpaid invoices from enterprise clients across the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. The deal is among the first instances of a GCC bank extending this kind of structured credit to a technology company rather than a traditional corporate borrower.

The facility solves one of the central tensions in TruKKer's business, where the company pays truck drivers and carriers quickly but enterprise clients settle invoices weeks or months later. Until now, that working capital gap had to be funded through equity rounds or venture debt. The ADCB facility lets TruKKer borrow against its receivables as they're generated, is non-recourse (meaning ADCB, not TruKKer, takes the loss if clients don't pay), and is structured as a Sharia-compliant murabaha harmonised across three countries with three different legal systems.

ADCB structured and funded the facility solo as sole arranger and sole lender, with White & Case and Paul Hastings architecting the legal framework across the three jurisdictions and HSBC sitting alongside as security trustee.

Founded in 2016 by Gaurav Biswas, TruKKer connects more than 60,000 transporters with over 1,200 enterprise clients across 40 countries. The company has raised over $500 million in equity and debt, including a $100 million pre-IPO round from Investcorp in late 2022.

Saudi fintech Stream has raised $5.2 million in a seed extension led by BECO Capital, with participation from STV, Flourish Ventures and Arab Bank, alongside existing investors Outliers and BYLD.

The round brings total seed funding to $9.2 million, less than six months after Stream closed its initial $4 million seed led by Outliers with Careem co-founder Abdullah Elyas among the angels.

Founded in 2024 by Ibrahim Aldlaigan, Stream builds billing and payments infrastructure that consolidates invoicing, recurring payments, reconciliation and cash flow tracking into a single platform.

The company first gained traction in early childhood education before expanding into SaaS and service-led businesses, and now processes millions in payments monthly for hundreds of businesses including Atyab and Riyadh Schools Group.

Only 7% of retail transactions in Saudi Arabia are recurring despite 70% being digital, according to the Saudi Central Bank's payments usage study, a gap Stream is built to close.

"Billing is evolving faster than most businesses realise," said Aldlaigan. "Stream is focused on removing any friction that slows or blocks businesses from getting paid. The demand we're seeing from customers is clear, so we extended the round to move faster."

BECO Capital founder Dany Farha said the firm's conviction was rooted in backing "a resourceful exceptional founder" building "the billing workflow layer for MENA, an entire new category between payment processing and accounting software with no direct incumbents."

Stream has also shipped subscription management APIs and introduced MCP support as a step toward AI-native payments infrastructure.

Andreessen Horowitz has led a $25 million Series A in Stitch, the Riyadh-based fintech infrastructure company, marking the Silicon Valley firm's first investment in the GCC.

Existing investors Arbor Ventures, COTU Ventures, RAED Ventures and SVC also participated. The round brings Stitch's total funding to $35 million, following a $10 million seed in 2025 led by Arbor, COTU and RAED.

Founded in 2022 by Mohamed Oueida, Stitch builds unified financial infrastructure for banks, lenders and fintechs, replacing the fragmented patchwork of legacy vendors that typically handles ledgers, payments, cards, lending and compliance as separate systems, each requiring its own integration and regulatory approval.

The company's thesis is that financial institutions have spent over $1 trillion on digital transformation in the past three years but remain stuck on the same fragmented infrastructure, and that no institution can meaningfully adopt AI without first having a clean, unified system of record to build on. The team includes operators from India's NPCI (the organisation behind UPI), FIS, Barclays, Santander and Azentio.

Traction since the Seed round last year has been considerable, with more than $5 billion transacted on the Stitch platform in the past six months alone. Customer numbers grew 10x in 2025 and revenue grew 20x over the same period. The company now operates across the GCC, Egypt, Kenya and Southeast Asia, with customers including Raya Financing (the lending arm of Hyundai and Peugeot), LuLu Exchange, Noqodi and Foodics.

"Financial institutions globally run on fragmented, legacy infrastructure that should have been left behind 20 years ago," said Oueida. "Now every institution wants to adopt AI, but AI on top of broken infrastructure is a dead end. We built Stitch to fix that."

Alex Rampell, general partner at a16z, which manages over $90 billion and has backed Coinbase, Stripe, GitHub and Databricks, said Stitch is building "a modern, unified system of record" that "makes everything else possible," and described the investment as the firm's first in the region.

The funding will go toward accelerating product development, deepening Stitch's presence across the GCC and broader MENA and expanding its global GTM operations.

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Table of contents

1. Earning the right to invest: Why pre-investment value-add is the real credibility-builder, and how it works in a market where founders have heard every promise before.

2. Setting the relationship up to last: Onboarding, governance, cadence, expectations, and the unglamorous business of looking after the founder behind the founder.

3. The dialectic of disagreement: Why productive conflict is the foundation of useful board work, and how the best investors in the region navigate the hard conversations.

4. The long arc: How the founder-investor relationship evolves as the company scales, what a healthy handoff looks like, and why the best of these relationships outlast the investment itself.

Thank you once again to Hasan Haider (Plus VC), Ambar Amleh (Ibtikar Fund), Zach Finkelstein (Class 5 Global), Ivo Detelinov (Oryx Fund), Laila Hassan (Algebra Ventures), Khaled Talhouni (Nuwa Capital), Michael Lints (Golden Gate Ventures), and Hussein Attar (Tech Invest Com) for opening up their fundraising strategies.

Now, let’s dig into it.

Step 1: Earning the right to invest

A founder takes a meeting with a VC.

The VC, charming and well-prepared, makes a series of confident assertions about what they bring to the table. Buzzwords abound. Network, strategic guidance, customer intros, and the intangible-yet-immensely-valuable benefit of having someone in their corner.

The founder, pressed for capital and inclined to believe the best, signs the term sheet.

Somewhere between three and six months later, the WhatsApp response times start getting slower.

By the time a founder in this region sits across from you at a pitch meeting, they've likely heard every iteration of the value-add monologue before, from VCs whose follow-through, when the time came, was conspicuously absent.

Which means, in practical terms, that the work of being a useful investor has to start long before the term sheet does, with whatever intro, advice, or genuine help you can offer in the months (or, very often, the years) when there's still no economic reason to.

Trust outside the investment

In ecosystems where venture has been institutionalised for several decades, transactional first-meetings are normal and expected, both parties show up, run through the deck, and either follow up or move on.

In markets like MENA where business culture remains heavily relational, walking into a founder's life with a transactional mindset is a way of signalling, before you've opened your laptop, that you don't quite understand the room you've walked into.

There's also, in our view, a structural benefit to the non-transactional approach that goes beyond the cultural one, which is that the relationship gets to form on a footing where the power dynamic isn't yet skewed by capital.

Both parties show up because they want to, not because one of them needs the other's money, and that equality of motive tends to produce a much more honest read of whether the thing should eventually become a financial relationship at all.

This is the reciprocity dynamic that defines pre-investment value-add in a small ecosystem. It isn't generosity for its own sake (though there are certainly worse things to be accused of, in venture or otherwise).

It's the recognition that founders remember who showed up when there was nothing in it for them, and in a market where the best deals are routinely oversubscribed and allocations are negotiated rather than offered, that institutional memory translates more or less directly into deal flow that money cannot buy.

Demonstrable value, day one

Class 5 Global’s Zach Finkelstein has codified the pre-investment value-add philosophy into something close to an actual framework, which is rare enough in an industry where most positioning of this kind defaults to vibes.

"Demonstrable value from day one" is a load-bearing phrase of sorts here, that carries with it an implicit critique of how most VCs actually operate. Which is to say, on a "trust me" basis, asking founders to extend credit on a value prop that conveniently won't be tested until well after the investment is locked in.

The international-networks angle, meanwhile, is calibrated to a very specific gap in the MENA founder experience, which is the difficulty of accessing the same calibre of founder-to-founder learning and VC pattern recognition that Bay Area counterparts more or less take for granted.

The implicit asymmetry is one of the most underrated advantages a multi-region investor has in MENA. A regional founder considering, say, a single-country to two-country expansion has the choice of either reasoning from first principles, which is slow and error-prone, or learning from someone who has already navigated the equivalent expansion in a structurally similar market, which is fast but requires access.

The MENA-to-Bay-Area version of this access is theoretically available but, in practice, frequently mediated by referral chains long enough that the conversation never quite happens.

The MENA-to-SEA version, on the other hand, can usually be set up in a single phone call by an investor who is genuinely embedded in both ecosystems, and the resulting conversation, in our experience, tends to be more useful to the MENA founder than its US-equivalent would have been, partly because the structural similarities are more honest, and partly because the ecosystem timeline gap is small enough that the lessons are still operationally fresh.

A VC who can credibly bridge a MENA fintech founder to a LatAm payments founder who's already navigated the same regulatory question is offering something that's genuinely difficult to replicate locally, and that, deployed properly, can shave a year or more off the founder's learning curve.

Done thoughtfully, cross-portfolio matchmaking is another one of the very few areas in venture where being a busier VC can actually make you a more useful one rather than a less useful one, provided you've put in the underlying work of understanding what each portfolio company actually does.

The discipline of being honest about what you can and can't reach is also a non-trivial form of value-add in its own right.

The default behaviour in this situation, especially when a founder has just asked for help and the investor is anxious to demonstrate utility, is to gesture vaguely at a possible intro that, in the moment of asking, sounded more concrete than it actually was.

The follow-through, two weeks later, is invariably more uncomfortable than the original ask, and the gap between what was promised and what materialises is precisely the territory in which the slow-burn value-destruction we've been describing actually occurs.

The investor who is willing to say, in real time, "I have no idea how to reach this person, but let me try", is the investor whose subsequent "I know exactly who you should talk to" actually means something.

The pull, not push, model

Hasan and Khaled's perspectives in particular are informed by an unusually high volume of portfolio touches, both being regional venture veterans, and when it comes to what founders actually want from their investors, the answer they've converged on is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the one most VCs find the very hardest to internalise.

Zach Finkelstein arrives at the same place via a slightly different route, and adds an operational corollary that is, in our view, worth taping somewhere visible in the office, or on an analyst’s forehead.

The skill isn't being available less, it's being well-calibrated enough to know when "available" is the help and when "available" is the burden. That distinction is the difference between a VC the founder is grateful for and a VC the founder is quietly engineering ways to avoid at industry get togethers.

Most VCs, given the choice, claim everything. The ones who claim only what they can deliver, and are explicit upfront about what they cannot, tend to be the ones who actually deliver on what they claim. Probably a wider lesson in there.

The differentiation question

If pre-investment value-add gets you the right to invest, and post-investment restraint earns you the right to stay useful, the question that remains is the one Zach raises, and which any GP in this region should be able to answer in a single, specific sentence.

The default answers, network, strategic guidance, capital efficiency, operational support, are the answers every VC gives, which is to say, they are not differentiating answers.

The investor whose pitch to founders includes "we make intros and offer strategic guidance" is, in functional terms, a parity offering.

The investor whose pitch is "we have specific Series A relationships at three named funds in San Francisco who have backed payments companies in your stage and geography, and we'll make those intros in the first ninety days," is pretty unique, and any half-decent founder can tell the difference inside two minutes.

The same logic we explored in Edition Two as applying to LP pitching applies just as directly here. If your post-investment prop sounds identical to every other one in the market, your portfolio is unlikely to look meaningfully different from every other portfolio, and the founders you'd most want to invest in will, given the choice, take the cheque from the firm with the more specific story.

The reputation flywheel

In the Valley, a VC can be quietly mediocre to twenty founders in succession before the reputational signal accumulates to the point of meaningfully affecting their deal flow. The market is large enough, the founder turnover high enough, and the social graph fragmented enough that bad behaviour gets diluted faster than it accumulates.

In MENA, we cannot overstate the extent to which the inverse is true. The founder pool is small enough that one badly-handled post-investment experience can become known to a meaningful portion of the next year's pipeline within weeks, sometimes days.

The downside, obviously, is that being unhelpful is uniquely costly.

The upside, less obviously but more consequentially, is that being genuinely useful is uniquely valuable, because the reputation it generates compounds in a way that is virtually impossible to replicate in larger markets.

In Step 2, we get into how that ethos translates into the operational rhythms of the founder relationship, onboarding, cadence, governance, expectations, and the unglamorous-but-critical question of what it means to look after the founder behind the founder.