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UAE-Based Consumer Company Amaani Raises $5M Series A to Expand AÏZA Across GCC Beauty Markets

The company will prioritise Saudi Arabia before launching its Middle Eastern skincare and haircare brand in Kuwait and Qatar.

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Dubai-based consumer company Amaani has raised $5 million in a Series A funding round to expand its beauty brand AÏZA across the GCC.

BECO Capital led the round, with participation from Homegrown Ventures and Peak XV’s Surge. The investment brings Amaani’s total funding to $8 million, following a $3 million seed round led by Surge in September 2025.

Amaani will use the capital to support AÏZA’s regional expansion, develop new products, recruit talent and strengthen the technology infrastructure behind the business.

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Building a Beauty Brand Around Arab Ingredients and Traditions

Founded in 2023 by Shubham Poddar, Amaani develops consumer brands originating from the Middle East. It launched AÏZA, its first skincare and haircare brand, in December 2024.

AÏZA develops products inspired by ingredients, scents and beauty traditions associated with the Arab world, including dates, black seed, frankincense, rose and bakhoor.

The company works with laboratories in Korea, Japan and Italy to incorporate these elements into modern skincare and haircare formulations.

“Three years ago, I left Sequoia Capital India with one conviction: the Middle East had become one of the world’s most sophisticated consumers of global beauty, but too few globally ambitious brands were built around the region’s own beauty culture,” said Shubham Poddar, founder and CEO of Amaani.

“AÏZA was created to change that, with original products inspired by the ingredients, rituals and cultural intelligence of Arabia.”

Saudi Arabia Becomes the Next Priority Market

Saudi Arabia will be AÏZA’s immediate expansion priority. The brand is scheduled to launch at Ulta Beauty locations in Red Sea Mall in Jeddah and Riyadh Park in Riyadh at the end of September 2026.

Amaani expects to enter Kuwait and Qatar during the fourth quarter, widening AÏZA’s physical retail presence beyond the UAE.

AÏZA is currently available through its own e-commerce platform, Ounass and Ulta Beauty in the UAE.

The company said AÏZA ranks among the ten leading brands sold by Ulta Beauty in the UAE, from a selection of more than 300 international and regional brands.

Revenue Grows Ninefold in the UAE

Amaani reported that AÏZA’s net revenue increased more than ninefold year over year during the first half of 2026 as the brand expanded from a digital-first business into physical retail.

AÏZA was also included in BeautyMatter’s NEXT50 list of emerging beauty and wellness companies, becoming the first Middle Eastern brand selected for the annual ranking, according to the company.

The brand’s operating model combines consumer product development with technology and artificial intelligence. Amaani uses these tools across creative testing, customer analytics, performance marketing and operational planning.

Investors Back a Regionally Built Consumer Brand

Abdulaziz Shikh Al Sagha, managing partner at BECO Capital, said the investment firm had spent several years studying the Gulf and wider Middle East beauty market.

“Amaani combines that discipline with a deep understanding of what regional consumers want,” he said. “That combination gave us the conviction to back Shubham and the team at this stage of their journey.”

Nader Amiri, co-founder and managing partner at Homegrown Ventures, said AÏZA is building original products rooted in regional ingredients and traditions while maintaining the ambition to compete internationally.

Following the round, Amaani will focus on translating AÏZA’s early traction in the UAE into sustained growth across larger GCC beauty markets.

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US Agentic Coding Platform Replit Acquires Egypt-Founded Analytics Startup Atta to Add Interactive Data Visualizations to AI Chat

Atta’s founders will join Replit as the US company integrates the startup’s business-analysis and data-visualisation technology into its platform.

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San Francisco-based AI software development platform Replit has acquired Atta, an Egypt-founded business analytics startup that helps users investigate company data and produce interactive visualisations.

The transaction was announced on September 25, 2026. Its financial terms were not disclosed.

As part of the acquisition, Atta co-founders Omar Shaik and Amine Ben Khalifa will join Replit, bringing the startup’s analytical expertise and purpose-built charting technology into the company’s broader product ecosystem.

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Bringing Interactive Charts Into Replit Chat

The first integration resulting from the acquisition is already available inside Replit’s conversational interface.

Users can open a Replit conversation, upload a dataset or connect an external data source, and ask the platform a business question. Replit then handles the underlying queries and analytical steps before presenting the results through interactive charts built using Atta’s technology.

Users can ask Replit Agent to “visualise this” or request a specific type of chart. The platform selects a visualisation based on the data and the question being investigated.

A waterfall chart could be used to explain a change in revenue, for example, while a heatmap could identify patterns in customer retention. Replit says users do not need to write SQL to conduct the analysis.

What Is Atta?

Atta was founded by Omar Shaik and Tunisian engineer and AI researcher Amine Ben Khalifa. The company initially emerged from Egypt before expanding its operations into Silicon Valley.

The startup developed an AI-powered business-analysis workspace intended to help employees investigate data, understand changes in company performance and communicate their findings without relying on separate technical or business-intelligence teams.

Its technology was designed to handle analytical decisions that users would otherwise need to make manually, including selecting the appropriate analytical method, choosing a chart format and preparing the resulting visualisation.

Atta’s charting system produces interactive and brand-consistent graphics whose labels, spacing and layouts adjust automatically when resized. The company positioned this capability as a way to reduce the manual work required to prepare charts and presentations for leadership meetings or internal updates.

Expanding Replit Beyond Software Creation

Founded in 2016, Replit enables users to build applications, websites and digital products using natural-language instructions.

The Atta acquisition extends the company’s platform beyond application development and into business data analysis. Replit wants users to move from asking questions about company performance to presenting findings and building tools or applications based on those insights within the same environment.

“Our mission is to make useful intelligence accessible to everyone,” Replit said in its announcement. “For businesses, that means giving the people closest to a problem the ability to investigate it, explain what they find, and act on their expertise.”

The company said its longer-term vision is to make data analysis part of everyday operational work rather than confining it to a standalone tool or specialist workflow.

From Business Questions to Operational Tools

Replit expects Atta’s technology to support workflows extending beyond one-time charts.

An analysis could eventually become a recurring report, generate presentation slides for a management review or inform the creation of an internal application, marketing campaign or product feature.

This model would connect data analysis with Replit’s existing application-building capabilities, allowing businesses to investigate a problem and develop a response within the same platform.

Shaik said Atta was founded to make business analysis more accessible to employees who understand operational problems but may not have the technical skills required to query data warehouses or select analytical methods.

Before the acquisition, Atta had worked with public companies using its platform to prepare quarterly business reviews and create documents connected directly to corporate data warehouses, according to Shaik.

Replit Continues Its International Expansion

The acquisition follows Replit’s opening of its first international office in London on September 8, 2026.

The London operation serves as the company’s European base and forms part of its efforts to expand its business among individuals, small companies and enterprise customers outside the United States.

Replit says it has more than 60 million users worldwide and is used by employees at 85% of Fortune 500 companies.

Following the Atta acquisition, Replit will focus on developing its new analytical capabilities beyond interactive charts. The company’s challenge will be to make business analysis accurate and reliable enough for operational decisions while maintaining the simplicity of a conversational interface.

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Qatar-Based AI Startup Aligator Raises $1.2M Seed Round to Expand Autonomous PR Agents Across MENA

Qatar Development Bank and Media City Qatar’s Next Ventures co-led the round, with additional participation from private investors.

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Doha-based agentic AI startup Aligator has raised $1.2 million (QAR 4.3 million) in a seed funding round to develop its autonomous public relations tools and expand across the GCC and wider Middle East and North Africa region.

Qatar Development Bank (QDB) and Next Ventures, a fund established by Media City Qatar, co-led the round. A group of unnamed private investors also participated.

Aligator plans to use the capital to accelerate product development, recruit employees across engineering, AI research and go-to-market functions, and expand its services to communications agencies, companies and government organisations across the region.

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Developing Autonomous AI Agents for Public Relations

Aligator develops AI agents designed to perform operational tasks across public relations and corporate communications.

The company’s technology can draft and distribute press materials, monitor media coverage, identify relevant journalists and publications, and manage outreach workflows.

Aligator is seeking to automate tasks that typically require communications professionals to move between multiple tools and manually track media activity. Its agents are designed to learn a client’s preferred writing style, target audiences, media landscape and campaign objectives.

The platform is intended to help PR teams reduce the time spent on repetitive work while retaining human involvement in strategy, editorial judgment and relationship management.

Aligator describes its product as an agentic PR platform in which AI agents work alongside communications professionals rather than functioning solely as content-generation tools.

A Qatar-Built AI Company

Aligator is led by founder and CEO Ali Abbas and co-founder and CTO Abdullah Khan. Its team includes graduates of Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar and Texas A&M University at Qatar, both members of Qatar Foundation’s Education City ecosystem.

The company operates from Doha and is incorporated in Media City Qatar and licensed by the Qatar Financial Centre, according to information provided in the funding announcement.

Its development reflects Qatar’s efforts to turn investments in education and technology infrastructure into locally built companies capable of serving regional and international markets.

Aligator has also been developing media-monitoring and reputation-intelligence products. In May 2026, it entered a partnership with communications consultancy BLJ Worldwide to strengthen media monitoring and analytics capabilities, including Arabic-language and dialect-specific analysis.

Reducing Manual Work in Communications

Public relations teams regularly spend time building media lists, tracking published coverage, preparing standard materials and following up with journalists.

Aligator is targeting these workflows with specialised AI agents capable of carrying out multiple connected tasks rather than producing individual pieces of content.

“Public relations is one of the most relationship-driven and time-intensive industries, yet much of the day-to-day work is repetitive and ripe for intelligent automation,” Abbas said.

He added that the funding would allow Aligator to advance its product roadmap, grow its engineering team and make its technology available to more communications professionals across the region.

The company will need to demonstrate that its tools can automate routine processes without compromising accuracy, editorial standards or the relationships on which public relations work depends.

Funding Product Development and Regional Expansion

Aligator will direct part of the seed funding toward expanding its range of autonomous PR agents and improving the technology underpinning its platform.

The startup also plans to hire employees across engineering and AI research as it increases the number of workflows its products can handle. Further recruitment in go-to-market roles will support customer acquisition and regional expansion.

Across the GCC and MENA region, Aligator plans to target public relations agencies, corporate communications departments and government teams.

The company has not disclosed its valuation, the equity acquired by investors or the number of customers currently using its platform.

Investor Support From Qatar

Qatar Development Bank said its investment reflected the potential of Aligator’s technology and the growing number of startups emerging from Qatar’s local innovation ecosystem.

QDB Executive Director of Incubation and Venture Capital Investment Mohammed Al-Emadi said the bank aims to give startups access to capital and ecosystem support as they develop their products and pursue further growth.

Next Ventures Director and Board Member Khalid Mubarak Al-Naimi said the fund backs companies capable of addressing market needs and expanding from Qatar into regional and international markets.

Following the seed round, Aligator’s next phase will focus on building additional AI agents, expanding its team and converting its technology into a scalable platform for communications professionals across MENA.

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Saudi PropTech Startup Rela Secures Undisclosed Strategic Investment from Yazeed Al Rajhi & Brothers Holding to Expand Workforce Housing Network

Yazeed Al Rajhi & Brothers Holding has joined Rela as an investor and strategic partner to support its expansion across Saudi Arabia.

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Saudi workforce housing startup Rela has secured an undisclosed investment from Yazeed Al Rajhi & Brothers Holding, which has joined the company as an investor and strategic partner.

The financial value of the transaction and the equity stake acquired by the holding company were not disclosed.

Rela plans to use the partnership to expand its network of workforce housing properties and residential complexes across Saudi Arabia while strengthening its operational capabilities.

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What Is Rela?

Launched in early 2026 by Salman Al Jabrain, Rela provides technology-enabled workforce accommodation and property management services.

The company combines licensed accommodation with property preparation, management, operations and maintenance through a single platform. It also provides supporting services such as employee transportation and catering.

Rather than operating solely as a marketplace, Rela manages the properties and associated services offered to corporate customers.

The startup connects property owners, developers and investors with companies seeking accommodation for their employees and workers. It then prepares and operates the properties according to the requirements of those corporate clients.

Managing Workforce Accommodation Through Technology

Rela’s technology platform enables businesses to reserve accommodation, monitor occupancy levels and allocate employees across different properties.

Corporate clients can also access operational data related to their accommodation network, giving them greater visibility into occupancy and property use.

This model is designed for companies that need to accommodate large or distributed workforces while maintaining consistent operating and service standards across one or multiple locations.

Rela provides accommodation in areas aligned with its customers’ operational requirements, including locations near major projects, industrial facilities and logistics operations.

Industries Served by Rela

The company targets businesses operating across construction, manufacturing, logistics, hospitality, retail, and operations and maintenance.

It also serves companies involved in major projects that require accommodation for large numbers of workers over extended periods.

These businesses may require more than residential units. Their needs can include furnishing and preparing properties, maintaining facilities, transporting workers and providing meals.

Rela combines these requirements within one managed service instead of requiring companies to coordinate with multiple accommodation and service providers.

Expanding Its Property Network Across Saudi Arabia

Following the investment, Rela plans to work with additional property owners, developers and investors to bring more buildings and residential complexes onto its platform.

The company will connect those available real estate assets with corporate demand for workforce accommodation while managing their preparation, operation and maintenance.

The expansion is expected to increase the number of locations available to Rela’s customers and strengthen its ability to support companies with workforces operating across different parts of the Kingdom.

The partnership with Yazeed Al Rajhi & Brothers Holding is also intended to support Rela’s operating capacity as it expands shortly after entering the market.

A Strategic Partnership for Rela’s Next Growth Phase

The investment comes only months after Rela began operations, giving the startup a strategic partner as it seeks to establish its presence in Saudi Arabia’s workforce accommodation sector.

Yazeed Al Rajhi & Brothers Holding’s participation provides Rela with more than financial backing, as the holding company will also support the startup as a strategic partner.

Rela’s growth will depend on its ability to add suitable properties to its network, secure long-term corporate customers and maintain consistent accommodation and service standards as its operations expand.

The company’s next phase will focus on increasing its property network and connecting more real estate assets with businesses seeking managed workforce accommodation across Saudi Arabia.

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