Bahrain-born cake customisation platform Lola has secured a fresh $3 million in seed funding, signalling that investor appetite for consumer foodtech in the Gulf is far from cooling off. The round was led by Vision Ventures, the same Saudi-based firm that backed Lola's earlier raise, with new participation from Aljazira Capital, Seedra Ventures, and returning supporter Plus VC. A handful of additional investors also joined, although their identities were not disclosed. The cash injection comes just over a year after the startup closed a $1.3 million pre-seed round in February 2025, which suggests momentum has been building faster than founder Othman Janahi originally anticipated.
Bahrain-born cake customisation platform Lola has secured a fresh $3 million in seed funding, signalling that investor appetite for consumer foodtech in the Gulf is far from cooling off. The round was led by Vision Ventures, the same Saudi-based firm that backed Lola's earlier raise, with new participation from Aljazira Capital, Seedra Ventures, and returning supporter Plus VC. A handful of additional investors also joined, although their identities were not disclosed.
The cash injection comes just over a year after the startup closed a $1.3 million pre-seed round in February 2025, which suggests momentum has been building faster than founder Othman Janahi originally anticipated. Lola began as a fairly narrow idea, namely fixing the awkward back and forth that usually happens when someone tries to order a custom cake from a local bakery. Anyone who has tried to describe a specific design over the phone or through a messaging app knows how often the final product ends up looking nothing like what was pictured. Lola's mobile platform replaces that messy process with a visual builder that lets customers piece together a cake in roughly a minute, choosing from thousands of design combinations before checking out.
That tech-first approach has clearly resonated. Since launching in Bahrain in late 2023, the company has pushed into Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Kuwait, with Riyadh joining the map in mid-2024 and Dubai following by the end of that year. Janahi has previously said the platform grew its order volume and market share roughly five times in its first year and a half, which goes some way toward explaining why existing investors were willing to write bigger cheques so quickly.
The bigger story behind this round, though, is operational. Up to now, Lola has leaned on partnerships with local bakeries to actually produce the cakes its customers design. That model worked well for getting into new cities quickly but left the company at the mercy of inconsistent quality. Part of the new funding will go toward building a central production facility in Dammam, paired with a network of so-called cloud bakeries spread across key cities. The idea is to centralise the things that need standardization while keeping fulfillment local enough to manage delivery times.
Vision Ventures' Kais Al Essa pointed to the size of the regional opportunity, noting that the broader market sits at roughly $9.5 billion in 2025 and is expected to climb past $12 billion by 2030. Janahi, for his part, has been clear that cakes are only the starting point. The longer term plan is to evolve Lola into a full celebration platform that covers gifting, decoration, and everything else that surrounds the moments people actually want to remember.
