INFOGRAPHIC: Startup Funding in Africa and the Middle East — Week 44, 2025
Here are the venture funding activities we tracked in the Middle East and African region this week – including BRKZ, maxwell+spark, Squadio, Logexa, Velents.ai, rmz.ai, Najeeb.ai and Kotani Pay
It’s been a surprisingly strong week for startup funding across Africa and the Middle East, and that’s saying something after Spiro’s $100 million raise and Moniepoint’s $90 million funding round last week. While those big-ticket deals set the tone, this week’s action shows that investor appetite for innovation in the region isn’t cooling off anytime soon. From Saudi Arabia’s construction tech and HR startups to Egypt’s homegrown AI breakthroughs, the funding wave continues, just in smaller, but equally strategic, doses.
Saudi Arabia led the pack again with contech startup BRKZ securing up to $30 million in growth debt from Stride Ventures. The funding will power its flexible payment and embedded financing tools, giving contractors and factories across the region much-needed breathing room to manage cash flow and scale faster.
Next up, South Africa’s maxwell+spark closed a $15 million (R250 million) Series B led by Klima, Alantra’s Energy Transition Fund. The round also pulled in new strategic backers like Chevron Technology Ventures and Japan’s Idemitsu, a major nod to the company’s clean-energy tech aimed at decarbonising industrial fleets.
In Saudi Arabia’s ever-expanding HR tech space, Squadio raised $3 million in a pre-Series A round backed by Wa’ed Ventures, 500 Sanabil MENA, SEEDRA Ventures, and others. The fresh capital will help the startup deepen its recruitment and workforce management tools across the Gulf.
The Kingdom’s logistics sector also saw movement: Logexa completed a $2 million pre-Series A round led by SEEDRA Ventures, joined by Nour Nouf Ventures and angel investors, as it works to streamline fulfilment operations for e-commerce and SMEs.
Egypt added its own AI milestone this week. Velents.ai, a startup specialising in enterprise AI, raised $1.5 million from angels including Google and BCG executives. The round coincided with the launch of Agent.sa, touted as the first fully Arabic-speaking AI employee for regional businesses, a strong play in the growing Arabic GenAI ecosystem.
Rounding off the week, rmz.ai, a Saudi generative AI startup, secured $100,000 in pre-seed funding from Beyond.xyz, while Najeeb.ai, another Saudi-born platform merging AI and insurtech, also wrapped up its undisclosed pre-seed round with local and regional angels. Over in Kenya, Kotani Pay caught attention after landing strategic investment from Tether, strengthening its Web3 payments infrastructure across Africa.
In total, the region saw over $50 million in fresh capital flow into startups this week, a clear sign that, even as global venture markets tighten, the Middle East and Africa’s innovation engine is still very much switched on.
