Pan-African innovation network AfriLabs has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Algerian Ecosystem Network (EYCONET) to expand structured startup deal sourcing and investment access across North Africa.

The partnership centres on the AfriLabs Connect Deal Room (ACDR), a digital platform that supports investment readiness and connects selected startups with investors and commercial opportunities.

Under the agreement, EYCONET will serve as the initiative’s local anchor in Algeria. The organisation will identify, verify and qualify high-growth startups before adding them to the ACDR investment pipeline.

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Building a Stronger Startup Pipeline in Algeria

EYCONET will use its local market knowledge to assess startups and ensure that companies entering the deal room meet the platform’s requirements.

Combining that local intelligence with AfriLabs’ continental infrastructure is intended to improve the consistency and quality of startup deal flow across North Africa. The model gives investors access to a more structured pipeline while helping founders prepare for investment discussions.

The collaboration aims to move beyond the promotional focus often associated with early-stage networking events. Instead, the organisations plan to connect startups with specific funding opportunities, commercial partners, government bodies and potential routes into new markets.

AfriLabs’ wider network will give qualified Algerian and North African companies greater visibility across the continent and internationally. It will also support closer cooperation with organisations that provide founders with the resources needed to grow their businesses.

Connecting Startups With Regional Opportunities

Support from Algeria’s Ministry of Knowledge Economy could give selected startups access to major ecosystem events, including the African Startup Conference.

EYCONET’s existing work with the Algerian Startup Fund adds another institutional connection to the partnership, strengthening the link between startup identification, investment preparation and potential access to capital.

The agreement also creates a route for Algerian startups to explore markets beyond their home country. Through AfriLabs’ cross-border network, founders could build relationships with investors, innovation organisations and business partners elsewhere in Africa.

EYCONET is an Algeria-based ecosystem network focused on entrepreneurship, startup development and innovation. Its role in the partnership will concentrate on sourcing and validating promising local companies, while AfriLabs provides the infrastructure and continental connections required to broaden their reach.

By integrating these capabilities, AfriLabs and EYCONET aim to create a more reliable path from local startup ecosystems to investors and regional growth opportunities. The partnership could also serve as a framework for improving how North African startups enter cross-border investment pipelines.

Aion Group has appointed Abdulaziz AlMolhem as Chairman and Steve Bertamini as Vice Chairman of the Board. Both have built and run banks in this region for close to three decades. They take the roles as Aion completes its first decade in the Kingdom, with its digital banking platform powering leading banks and greenfield digital banks across Saudi Arabia and the GCC.

The board’s first announcement is a set of AI capabilities for business banking on Aion’s Ai966 platform, built specifically for Saudi conditions.

The appointments come as the Saudi financial industry commits an estimated US$15 billion to technology modernisation between 2026 and 2030. Most of that spend will land on core systems built in the 1990s. What the market needs is not a five-year core replacement, but a modern, intelligent layer above the core that lets a bank scale digital business now.

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That layer is what Aion builds. Riyadh headquartered, with 200 bankers, technologists, designers and data scientists on the ground, more than 800 banking APIs in production, and open banking authorisations from SAMA, the Central Bank of Bahrain and the UK’s FCA. Being local has changed the economics of modernisation outright. What global vendors scope in years, Aion ships in months, at a fraction of the cost. This is the capability Vision 2030 set out to build in the Kingdom, and it is now exporting beyond it.

“I have sat on the bank side of this conversation for most of my career,” said Abdulaziz AlMolhem, Chairman of Aion Group. “The technology was rarely the hard part. Finding a partner who understands how a Saudi bank actually decides, procures and operates was. That partner now exists in the Kingdom, and it is Saudi owned.”

SAUDI ARABIA HAS JUST BUILT THE DATA LAYER NO OTHER SME MARKET HAS

On 30 June 2026, Saudi Arabia completed the final wave of ZATCA’s e-invoicing mandate, pulling every business with more than SAR 375,000 of annual revenue into real-time invoice clearance. Set alongside SAMA’s open banking regime, formally licensed since March 2026, a Saudi bank can now see verified, invoice-level revenue and live account behaviour for effectively the entire SME market, before a business ever applies for anything.

No other major economy has that. Cash-flow lending took a decade to half-build in the UK and Europe on data SMEs volunteered. In Saudi Arabia it has arrived as national infrastructure, in a market that has to roughly double its SME book: SME credit stood at SAR 351.7 billion, 9.4 percent of bank loan books, against a Vision 2030 target of 20 percent on a private-sector loan book that has now passed SAR 3.4 trillion, with Kafalah guaranteeing up to 80 percent of the risk. That is on the order of SAR 300 billion of new SME credit to be originated by 2030. It will not be originated by relationship managers carrying a hundred accounts each on a 1990s core. It gets originated on data.

THE AI GAP IS NOT THE MODEL. IT IS THE OUTCOME.

Saudi banks are collectively running more than 100 AI use cases today. Very few can show what any of them earned. Across the GCC, close to 60 percent of financial institutions report rapid AI adoption, while only 14 to 28 percent have scaled it across business functions.

The model layer is no longer the constraint. The Kingdom has world-class compute, and Arabic-first frontier models are now shipping from Riyadh, with HUMAIN releasing humain-m3 at LEAP this month and putting ALLAM onto Microsoft’s global platform. The constraint has moved downstream, into the bank: turning a signal into an action a relationship manager takes, and proving what that action was worth.

That is the problem Ai966 was built for. It reads a bank’s own transaction and behavioural data and turns it into action across lead generation, credit, early warning and risk. A business heading for trouble shows it in its flows months before it calls the branch. A business ready to borrow is usually banking elsewhere already. Aion surfaces both, routes them into the workflows where decisions actually get made, and measures every intervention against a holdout group, so the bank explicitly sees the incremental revenue.

The design is deliberately Saudi. SARIE flows. ZATCA cycles. GOSI patterns. SAMA rules. The way credit and relationship teams here actually work. A model trained outside this context does not read this market.

“Banks should stop paying for AI experiments and start paying for outcomes they can audit,” said Ashar Nazim, Chief Executive of Aion Group. “We measure against a holdout group because that is the only number a CFO can defend. If the lift is not there, the bank should not pay for it.”

WHY BUSINESS BANKING

Aion’s focus on the business banking stack is a choice. It is where the real economy and the financial economy meet, where a business owner’s cash flow becomes a bank’s capital allocation decision. Get that right and money moves easier, credit decisions happen earlier, cash management scales, and growth stops depending on headcount. Vision 2030 asks Saudi businesses to carry 35 percent of GDP, up from roughly 20 percent. That gets delivered on Aion infrastructure built in Saudi.

“Every bank in the Kingdom now carries an SME growth mandate it cannot meet on the systems it already owns,” said Steve Bertamini, Vice Chairman of Aion Group. “Building that capability from scratch costs upwards of US$200 million and takes years. Deploying it costs a fraction of that and takes months. The commercial logic is not close.”

The Global Islamic Finance Awards named Aion Best Islamic Digital Solutions Provider 2026, announced at the ceremony in London this month. The category rewards technology moving Islamic finance forward in practice rather than in principle. The recognition lands on a company already running the SME banking stack behind leading banks in the Kingdom.

About Aion Group

Aion Group is a Riyadh-headquartered banking infrastructure company, founded in 2017 and funded by client revenue rather than venture capital. Its Rubix platform is the intelligent middleware banks use to build and run retail, SME and corporate digital businesses, with more than 800 APIs deployed across Saudi Arabia and the GCC. Ai966 is its data and AI layer, turning a bank’s own transaction data into measured commercial outcomes. Aion holds open banking authorisations in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Kingdom, and serves financial institutions across the region from talent hubs in Riyadh, Manama and Karachi.

Egyptian financial technology startup Zeal has closed a $10 million funding round to expand its payment and point-of-sale technology across the Middle East, Europe and Africa.

The company did not disclose the funding stage, the participating investors or further details about the transaction. Zeal said the fresh capital will support the expansion of its technology solutions and accelerate its geographic growth.

Founded in 2019 by Omar Ebeid and Belal Mohamed, Zeal develops payment tools designed to help physical retailers understand and engage with customers through the point of sale.

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Turning Payments Into Customer Insights

At the centre of Zeal’s offering is its SmartPOS Plugin, a product that adds customer engagement capabilities to the payment process without requiring retailers to replace their existing point-of-sale infrastructure.

The technology enables merchants to identify customers when they complete in-store payments. Businesses can then classify those shoppers based on available transaction data and reconnect with relevant customer groups after a purchase.

This approach aims to give physical retailers access to some of the customer intelligence and engagement tools commonly available to online businesses. Ecommerce platforms can typically track how users browse, purchase and return, while offline stores often have less visibility into the individuals completing transactions at their tills.

Zeal is seeking to close that information gap by using the point of sale as a channel for both payment acceptance and customer recognition. Rather than treating each in-store transaction as an isolated event, its technology helps merchants build a clearer understanding of customer activity and use those insights to support repeat engagement.

Building Through Payment Partnerships

Zeal said it has made progress in the payments sector through work with companies including Ingenico and Network International.

These relationships place its technology within a wider payments ecosystem that includes terminals, transaction infrastructure and merchant services. Integrating its product with established providers can help Zeal reach retailers without requiring it to build every part of the payment stack independently.

The startup has also received recognition through the Visa Everywhere Initiative, a global innovation programme for fintech companies developing payment and commerce solutions.

Geographic Expansion Ahead

Zeal plans to use the new financing to expand throughout the Middle East, Europe and Africa. Entering markets across three regions will require the company to adapt its technology to different payment environments, merchant requirements and consumer behaviours.

Its expansion strategy centres on a product that sits within retailers’ existing checkout operations. This could lower the practical barrier to adoption for merchants seeking customer engagement tools without introducing a separate system into the purchasing journey.

The company has not identified which countries it will prioritise or provided a timetable for its international rollout. It has also not disclosed how the investment will be divided between product development, hiring and market entry.

With $10 million in new capital, Zeal is positioning its SmartPOS Plugin as more than a payment feature. The startup wants to turn the checkout into a source of customer intelligence, helping retailers recognise, segment and re-engage shoppers while expanding its technology beyond Egypt.