Agriculture technology and food innovation
Qatar-based restaurant-technology startup DineNORDER has expanded into Egypt, bringing its all-in-one digital platform to one of the region's largest food-service markets. Founded only in 2023, it is a bold cross-border leap into a competitive arena.
Aramco Ventures has led a 9.5 million dollar Series A for India's Mitti Labs, its first India bet. The startup uses satellites and AI to cut methane and water use in Asia's rice fields, an unexpected pairing that fits Aramco's carbon-data interests.
UAE food-tech startup jalebi.io has shut down permanently, and its closure is instructive precisely because it looked successful. It won awards, signed institutional clients and beat Microsoft, SAP and Oracle on deals, right up to the end.
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 strategic angel investors.
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, led by Tawuniya, Saudi Arabia's largest insurer, alongside Global Ventures.
The Saudi food and beverage sector keeps quietly reshuffling itself through deals that rarely grab the front pages, and Nofoth Food Products has just added another. The Nomu listed company has signed a non binding memorandum of understanding to explore acquiring a 70 per cent stake in Al Waal Al Bari Beverages.
The Arab world's startup conversation tends to orbit the Gulf and Egypt, which is why a modest deal out of Tunisia is worth pausing on. RoboCare, a Tunisian agritech building AI powered precision agriculture tools, has secured a fresh six figure investment from venture firm 216 Capital to expand across Africa and the Middle East.
Saudi Arabia wants to turn vast stretches of desert green, and one of the biggest obstacles is the dirt itself. Terraxy, an agritech startup spun out of KAUST, has raised $3 million in a Seed-2 round led by Aramco's Wa'ed Ventures to scale a soil enhancer built for sandy, degraded land.
Khloud, the protein popcorn company that Khloe Kardashian founded, has pulled in another $15 million, according to a securities filing that surfaced in late may. The new money pushes the brand's total funding to roughly $27 million, and the plan behind it is fairly straightforward. Khloud wants to be on more shelves, in more cities, and in front of more shoppers who have decided that protein belongs in almost everything they eat, including their afternoon snack.
Peekabox has raised an oversubscribed $1.5 million seed round to scale its surplus food marketplace across the UAE. The platform lets consumers buy end-of-day food from over 1000 partner outlets at guaranteed discounts of 50 to 70%.