Tawuniya leads $2.8m round for Maalexi's tokenised trade platform

Published: 2026-07-06T12:38:10.000Z

Maalexi has closed a 2.8 million dollar funding round with an unusually pointed ambition, which is to build what it calls the world's first regulated exchange for agricultural commodities. The Abu Dhabi-based agri-fintech, founded in 2021 by Azam Pasha and Rohit Majhi, drew an oversubscribed round led by Tawuniya, Saudi Arabia's largest insurer and a company listed on the Tadawul, alongside the returning UAE venture firm Global Ventures and a clutch of angel investors from the region and the United States. The capital is meant to carry Maalexi from a working trade platform towards a full exchange and to set up a larger Series A. The product at the center of this is MAATEX, the Maalexi Agricultural Assets Token Exchange, which the company is pitching as a regulated venue where tokenized agricultural commodities can be traded and settled on-chain, with every trade backed by verified physical goods. The pitch rests on a simple diagnosis, namely that cross-border food trade has never had a proper exchange because the underlying business is fragmented, hard to verify and short on common standards. Maalexi's answer is a stack that blends AI-driven trade intelligence, IoT sensors that monitor goods in storage and transit, and blockchain-enforced settlement, with the on-chain registry sitting on Avalanche. The company is not starting from a blank slate, which is what gives the plan some credibility. Over 36 months of live operations across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, India and the United States, it reports a 70 per cent repeat-customer rate and more than 4,000 smart contracts executed, alongside a handful of patents filed in the US. It has also lined up financing muscle, having secured a Shariah-compliant credit facility of up to 20 million dollars from Amwal Capital Partners last August. Tawuniya's investment chief framed the appeal in terms of market resilience, while Pasha cast the round as a sign of institutional confidence in modernizing how food is traded. The regional logic is hard to overstate. The Gulf imports the overwhelming majority of its food, so any infrastructure that makes cross-border agricultural trade more verifiable and liquid speaks directly to the food-security goals baked into both Vision 2030 and the UAE's national strategy. Tawuniya's involvement also ties the venture to Saudi Arabia's push to become a regional fintech and digital-asset hub, while the UAE has built some of the world's clearer rules for tokenized assets through Dubai's VARA and the ADGM. Real-world asset tokenization is already a live theme across the region, from property to commodities, and a listed insurer anchoring a blockchain-based exchange may nudge other traditional players to follow.