THE STANDOUT DEAL: YUNO’S $45M SERIES B WITH GULF SOVEREIGN BACKING The biggest story of the past two weeks isn’t a regional startup. It’s a global payments company that has quietly embedded itself into the Gulf’s financial infrastructure, and the region’s sovereign funds noticed. Yuno, an AI-native payments operating system, closed a $45 million Series B led by Global PayTech Ventures on August 12, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, QuantumLight Capital (the AI venture firm founded by Revolut CEO Nik Storonsky), Monashees, Kaszek, and Endeavor Catalyst. The Gulf angle is the real story. Regional strategic investors include Abu Dhabi’s sovereign-backed Further Ventures alongside Qatar’s Rasmal Ventures and GrowthX Capital, taking total funding to $80 million. This isn’t just Gulf money chasing a global name. The round is notable because Yuno already runs live payment infrastructure across the UAE and the rest of the Gulf. Two of the participating investors carry direct Gulf ties: Rasmal Ventures is backed by the Qatar Investment Authority, and Further Ventures is backed by Abu Dhabi sovereign capital. Gulf sovereign-linked money sitting inside a “global” Series B before any formal regional headquarters announcement is a detail easy to miss if you only read the round as a Latin American fintech story. The infrastructure is already live. In February 2026, Yuno partnered with Tap Payments, one of MENA’s largest licensed payment institutions serving more than 120,000 businesses including TikTok, Talabat and Keeta. The partnership gives Yuno’s enterprise merchants access to Tap’s regulated infrastructure across all six GCC states including local rails like Mada in Saudi Arabia, KNET in Kuwait and NAPS in Qatar. Yuno is establishing Qatar as its GCC hub, with capital funding expansion of its Gulf regional office and product rollout across the Middle East. The broader lesson: payments infrastructure businesses are rarely glamorous, but they are often the most defensible layer in any market. DEALS THIS WEEK 🇸🇦 AILA | $3M Pre-Series A | EdTech Saudi Arabia-based edtech AILA raised $3 million in a pre-Series A round led by Rua Growth Fund, with participation from Jo Academy, 500 Global, Bunat VC and Fikr Ventures. Founded in 2023 by Yousef Al-Sayed, Nouf Mugayel and Abdulaziz Bin Mugayel, the firm develops AI-powered personalized learning technology that identifies learning gaps and provides tailored assessments, practice and performance insights. AILA’s Arabic-first approach is particularly relevant. Building AI learning tools around the needs of Arabic-speaking students addresses a gap in the global EdTech market, where many AI products are developed primarily for English-speaking users and then adapted for other languages. Saudi Arabia is quietly becoming one of the more interesting edtech markets in the region, and AILA is a company worth tracking. 🇯🇴🇦🇪 HeyBreez | $2.5M Seed | Voice AI MENA-born enterprise voice AI startup HeyBreez raised $2.5 million in an oversubscribed seed round led by Lunara Partners, with participation from Jabbar Group, DASH Ventures and angel investors. Founded in 2025 by Karim Malhas, HeyBreez is headquartered in Delaware with offices in Amman and Dubai. Its platform provides infrastructure for deploying and managing enterprise voice AI agents, including telephony, callbacks, follow-ups and integrations. The company said its platform processes more than 1 million calls a month for enterprises, agencies, developers and AI companies across MENA, Europe, the US and Latin America. One million calls a month at seed stage is a real traction number. Voice AI infrastructure for enterprises is genuinely underserved in the region. 🇴🇲 Oman: Cyfr Capital Backs Five Startups via Future Fund Oman Venture capital firm Cyfr Capital completed investments in five Omani startups through its Seed Fund in collaboration with Future Fund Oman. The investments went to automotive marketplace Sooq Cars, food delivery platform iO Eats, tourism marketplace Darrbak, AI and data company Decoil, and packaging and storage provider Pack’N. Sooq Cars has more than 1 million users, while iO Eats operates cloud kitchens across six locations serving more than 30 restaurants. Darrbak provides access to more than 260 tourism experiences from over 76 local providers. Five deals in one announcement is unusual. Oman’s startup ecosystem doesn’t get much coverage relative to its Gulf peers, but this batch of investments signals that local capital is beginning to back diverse, consumer-facing models rather than waiting for regional validation from Dubai or Riyadh first. 🇸🇦 Pinnacle | New Growth-Stage Fund | Saudi PE Saudi Arabia-based Pinnacle launched a venture capital fund focused on growth-stage companies and secondary investments in the Kingdom. The fund will invest in Saudi technology companies thro
