Uvera attracts Morgan Stanley, LAB7 and Core Vision in seed round

Published: 2026-07-09T14:19:48.000Z

Uvera has closed a seed round that says rather a lot about where Saudi deeptech now sits in the world's imagination, drawing in Morgan Stanley Inclusive and Sustainable Ventures alongside LAB7, the venture-building arm of Aramco, and Core Vision, plus a group of strategic angel investors. The company did not disclose how much it raised, which is common at this stage, but the identity of the backers matters more than the figure. A Wall Street institution and the venture arm of the world's largest oil producer rarely appear on the same cap table, least of all for a business built around keeping strawberries fresh. The Dhahran-based startup was founded in 2019 by Asrar Damdam, and it began life as a research idea during her doctoral work before turning into a company. Its technology tackles a deceptively enormous problem, namely that fresh food spoils long before it needs to. Uvera pairs a proprietary shelf-life extension method, which preserves produce without chemicals, with blockchain-backed traceability, IoT sensors and artificial intelligence, giving producers, distributors and retailers a view of what is happening to their goods between farm and shelf. The pitch is that food lasts longer, waste falls and inventory decisions get smarter, all from the same platform. The new money will fund commercial deployments and further development of that platform, though the Aramco connection carries more than capital. LAB7 has agreed to work directly with Uvera on the technical robustness, scalability and data integrity of its traceability and supply chain intelligence tools, the sort of engineering support a young deeptech firm cannot easily buy. Morgan Stanley's involvement flows from its in-house accelerator, where Uvera was selected for the 2025 global cohort, and Damdam has spoken about seeing the company appear on the Nasdaq billboard in Times Square to mark the investment, a moment she framed as a reminder of how far a research idea can travel. The regional logic behind all this is hard to overstate. Gulf states import the overwhelming majority of their food, which makes waste an expensive and strategically uncomfortable problem, and Saudi Arabia has pushed food security squarely into its Vision 2030 agenda while establishing bodies to cut losses across the supply chain. Aramco's venture arm backing a food preservation firm also fits a wider pattern in which Saudi energy money deliberately seeds non-oil industries, echoing the way the UAE has funded agritech through vehicles like Silal and Pure Harvest. For an ecosystem often accused of favoring fintech and e-commerce, Uvera is evidence that harder science is finding its own investors.