COFE Tech closes pre-IPO round at $178 million valuation

A coffee app with bigger ambitions COFE Tech has closed a pre-IPO funding round that puts the company's valuation at $178 million, a marker that reflects how far it has travelled from its original identity as a consumer coffee-ordering app. The Saudi company built its early business on connecting coffee drinkers with cafes, and it has since been evolving toward enterprise technology. The company has not detailed publicly which enterprise products make up that business or how much of its revenue they account for. The pre-IPO label is the headline here. It signals that COFE Tech and its backers see a public listing as the next realistic step rather than a distant ambition, and that the company is positioning its balance sheet, governance and investor base accordingly before it gets there. The company has not disclosed a listing venue or timeline, and TechScoop is not speculating on either. Wa'ed's involvement Among the participants in the round is Wa'ed, the entrepreneurship and venture arm affiliated with Saudi Aramco that has backed a number of Saudi technology companies as they scale. Wa'ed's involvement adds a strategically significant name to COFE Tech's cap table, though the specific size of its stake in this round has not been disclosed. From app to enterprise stack What makes COFE Tech's trajectory notable is the direction of travel: a company that started as a consumer ordering app is now positioning itself as an enterprise technology business. That shift is part of the context for the pre-IPO valuation, although the company has not broken down how its valuation or revenue splits between its consumer and enterprise activities. Part of a broader pre-IPO moment COFE Tech's move follows a broader pattern across the region of increasingly mature technology companies openly discussing public-market ambitions rather than treating an IPO as a hypothetical exit. Fasset's climb to a $1 billion valuation after its own Series C round is a different sector and a different capital structure, but it reflects the same underlying story: regional technology companies are now being priced, and are pricing themselves, for a life beyond venture funding. For a fuller sense of how COFE Tech's raise fits alongside the rest of September's MENA funding activity, see TechScoop's roundup of the biggest MENA startup rounds since LEAP 2026 . What "pre-IPO" actually signals A pre-IPO round is a specific kind of financing, distinct from an ordinary late-stage growth round. Companies raise pre-IPO capital when they are consciously preparing their balance sheet, governance structure and reporting standards for the scrutiny that comes with a public listing, rather than simply funding another year of growth. Investors who participate at this stage are typically betting on a defined, foreseeable path to liquidity through a listing, rather than the more open-ended timeline that characterizes an ordinary Series C or D. That is part of why the valuation figure itself matters here: $178 million becomes a reference point that a future listing will be measured against, for better or worse. A consumer app rebuilding itself as an enterprise company COFE Tech's path is also a useful case study in a pattern showing up more broadly across the region's consumer technology sector: apps that built an initial user base on a single consumer use case and then moved toward enterprise products. It is a harder pivot than it sounds — enterprise buyers evaluate a vendor differently than consumers evaluate an app, on criteria like reliability, integration and support rather than convenience alone — and COFE Tech's decision to make that shift, rather than simply scale its original coffee-ordering product, is the backdrop to this round. What comes next COFE Tech's own disclosures stop at the valuation figure and Wa'ed's participation. What happens between a pre-IPO round and an actual listing — audited financials, exchange approval, pricing — is a process TechScoop will continue to track as more details become public. COFE Tech's progress from here will be a reference point for other regional technology companies with listing ambitions. Sources Wamda