MENA's ten biggest deals took 58% of all its funding

The ten largest transactions accounted for 58% of all Middle East and North Africa venture funding in the first half of 2026, according to MAGNiTT. Two of them — UAE companies CargoX and Mal — took $480m between them, more than a third of the regional total on their own. Meanwhile the number of deals fell 41%, against a 22% fall in capital. Funding held up better than activity because a small number of very large rounds carried the total. Strip the top ten out and the remaining 204 deals shared roughly 42% of the money. That is a market where the top is functioning and the base is thinner. Companies at scale, with proven revenue and international-standard governance, are raising. Companies below that line are finding it harder, and the deal count is where that shows. It creates a reporting problem. Regional funding totals are quoted constantly — by founders benchmarking, by funds raising, by officials on conference stages. A headline of $1.35bn sounds like a broad ecosystem. It describes one to the extent that two companies represent an ecosystem. A total that two transactions can move by a third is not a measure of breadth, and using it as one leads to decisions that do not match conditions: founders who believe capital is available at their stage when it is scarcer than the headline implies, and analysis that reads the market as broader than the deal count says. Deal count is the harder number to distort. It fell 41%. Concentration itself is normal. Power-law outcomes are standard in venture, a handful of rounds dominates any quarter in Europe or Southeast Asia too, and nobody treats that as pathology. What distinguishes a thin market is what sits underneath the outliers. In a deep ecosystem the mega-rounds sit on a broad base of smaller activity that is also growing. Here the base contracted almost twice as fast as the headline. The investor mix compounds it. Large late-stage rounds are the ones that most need international participation, and active international investors fell 48% to 95 across the entire region. That two very large rounds closed anyway says something real about those two companies. It says less about how many others could do the same this year.