Foodics completes its full acquisition of Norma AI

Published: 2026-06-23T11:32:03.000Z

The smartest acquisitions often start as a handshake and end as a wedding, and Foodics has completed exactly that. The Riyadh based restaurant tech giant has finalized its full acquisition of Norma AI, a Greek hospitality analytics company, after first taking a minority stake and integrating its technology in 2025.

The smartest acquisitions often start as a handshake and end as a wedding, and Foodics has just completed exactly that kind of journey. The Riyadh based restaurant technology giant has finalized its full acquisition of Norma AI, a Greece based artificial intelligence company built for the hospitality industry. This is not a sudden swoop, since Foodics first took a minority stake in Norma in the first quarter of 2025, integrated its technology, watched it get adopted across more than 10,000 customer branches, and only then moved to buy the whole thing. Terms were not disclosed, but the staged approach tells you Foodics did its due diligence in the most practical way possible, by living with the product first. What Norma actually does explains why it was worth owning outright. Founded by George Henein and Anastasios Anastasiadis, the company set out to bridge the awkward gap between hospitality operators and their own data. In 2024 it launched what the companies describe as the hospitality industry's first natural language business intelligence application, which lets a restaurant manager with no technical background simply ask a question in plain language, get an instant answer, and build a custom dashboard in seconds. That matters in an industry where the people running a busy kitchen rarely have time to wrestle with spreadsheets, and where the difference between a good and bad decision often comes down to how fast you can read the numbers. The strategic logic is about speed and transformation. Foodics co-founder and chief executive Ahmad Al-Zaini was candid that acquiring Norma was faster than building the capability from scratch, calling it a way to rapidly gain mature technology and expertise that would have been time consuming to develop in house. With the deal done, Norma's team joins a dedicated Foodics AI division focused on building the next generation of agentic AI for restaurants, the kind that does not just report data but acts on it, giving operators real time, intelligent decision making. Al-Zaini has been open that mergers and acquisitions are a core part of the company's growth playbook, and that he looks for teams with deep product knowledge, a real market and consistent revenue growth. The scale Foodics brings to the table is what makes this significant. Founded in 2014, the company now powers more than 40,000 restaurant branches across the GCC and North Africa, has processed over six billion orders, and handles gross merchandise volume exceeding $12 billion. It raised a record $170 million Series C in 2022 led by Prosus and Sanabil, and runs a SAMA licensed fintech arm called Foodics Pay. Folding Norma's agentic capabilities into that footprint amounts to one of the largest AI deployments in the global hospitality sector. The regional read fits a broader pattern. Across the Middle East and North Africa, well capitalized tech champions are increasingly acquiring specialized foreign startups rather than building every capability themselves, with Saudi firms in particular reaching into Europe and beyond for AI talent. A Riyadh based platform buying a Greek AI company to accelerate its evolution into an AI-native business is a clear sign of how the region's leading tech firms are starting to behave like global consolidators.