The CTO Show Brief: Issue 140

Author

Mehmet Gonullu
October 12, 2025

Welcome to Issue 140 of The CTO Show Brief!

The MEA startup ecosystem showed remarkable resilience this week, with over $50 million raised across Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and Kenya—driven by cleantech, AI, and digital infrastructure plays. Regional investors are doubling down on sustainability and data-led innovation, while global funds continue to look East, from MGX’s participation in OpenAI’s $6.6B share sale to Janus Henderson’s $125M MENA credit fund. Meanwhile, new trade and investment missions from Canada, Ireland, and the UAE underscore a region rapidly positioning itself as the crossroads of AI, climate tech, and cross-border venture growth.

Whether you’re one of our 2,774 subscribers or a first-time reader—grab your coffee, and let’s dive into what’s shaping tech and venture this week!

MEA Tech Momentum

Startup Funding Rounds

Regional Funding Overviews

VC Fund Activities

Investment Missions and Agreements

 🌍 Global Tech & VC Pulse

Navigating the AI Singularity — A Week of Strategic Recalibration

This week wasn’t just influenced by AI — it was remade by it. The global tech and VC landscape continues to split into two distinct realities: the AI-driven ecosystem commanding trillion-dollar bets, and a cautious, fundamentals-focused world fighting an “innovation winter.”

Here’s your at-a-glance breakdown 👇

1️⃣ AMD & OpenAI: The AI Compute Arms Race Intensifies

            •          AMD and OpenAI struck a multi-billion-dollar partnership, with AMD committing 6 GW of Instinct GPUs to power OpenAI’s next-gen models.

            •          OpenAI receives warrants for up to 160M AMD shares (~10% stake), directly aligning their fortunes.

            •          The deal diversifies OpenAI’s supply chain away from Nvidia’s 80% GPU market share dominance.

            •          It’s a game-changer for AMD, legitimizing its ROCm ecosystem and giving OpenAI design influence over future chips.

            •          Yet analysts warn of a looming AI valuation bubble, fueled by circular vendor financing between OpenAI and its suppliers.

📊 Bottom line: AI compute is now the most valuable strategic currency in tech. The AMD-OpenAI alliance signals a two-horse race in AI hardware — with trillion-dollar stakes.

2️⃣ Strategic AI M&A: Data & Embodiment Take Center Stage

            •          Qualtrics acquires Press Ganey Forsta for $6.75B, securing a proprietary healthcare dataset of 41,000+ providers to train vertical AI models.

            •          SoftBank buys ABB’s Robotics division for $5.4B, advancing its “Physical AI” and Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) vision.

            •          These deals show a new M&A logic: acquiring irreplaceable assets — data or hardware — instead of mere tech.

📊 Bottom line: Proprietary data and embodied robotics are becoming the twin pillars of AI defensibility. Expect a wave of similar acquisitions as incumbents scramble to secure AI moats.

3️⃣ The Great VC Bifurcation: Innovation Winter for Non-AI Startups

            •          Global VC funding rose 38% YoY to $97B in Q3, but 46% of all capital went to AI startups.

            •          62.7% of US venture funds now primarily back AI, starving HealthTech, FinTech, and DeepTech of capital.

            •          Non-AI founders must now prove profitability, CAC payback <12 months, and LTV/CAC >3:1 to raise funds.

            •          Investors demand every startup articulate an AI advantage — even if it’s not their core business.

📊 Bottom line: The market’s gone “AI-only.” For everyone else, resilience, unit economics, and intelligent AI integration are now survival skills.

4️⃣ A New Lifeline: Climate Tech Fights Back

            •          The All Aboard Coalition, led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and DCVC, launched a $300M fund to bridge the “valley of death” for capital-intensive climate startups.

            •          The initiative pools capital to fund first-of-a-kind manufacturing facilities, providing a model for other deep-tech sectors.

📊 Bottom line: Collaborative, thematic funds like this may become the new template for non-AI deep-tech survival — enabling progress in climate, quantum, and advanced manufacturing despite market bias.

5️⃣ IPO Market: Cautious Thaw Amid Liquidity Logjam

            •          Global IPOs up 19% YoY in Q3 (370 listings; $48.3B raised).

            •          LG Electronics IPO drew strong demand, signaling a return of investor confidence — but only for profitable, established players.

            •          High-growth startups like Stripe and Databricks remain on hold, sustaining a late-stage liquidity crunch and driving massive private rounds.

📊 Bottom line: The IPO window is reopening selectively — favoring profitability over hype. The liquidity bottleneck continues to reshape late-stage venture dynamics.

⚖️ Final Take: Two Ecosystems, Two Playbooks

            •          Inside AI: Scale, compute, and alliances define success.

            •          Outside AI: Profitability, resilience, and strategic AI integration are the new edge.

            •          Emerging coalitions like All Aboard hint at a third way — collaborative capital designed to sustain deep-tech innovation beyond the hype cycle.

We’re witnessing the great divergence of modern venture capital — where intelligence, not capital alone, defines winners.

 🎙️Episodes Recap:

In this episode of The CTO Show with Mehmet, host Mehmet Gonullu welcomes Marco Benitez, Founder & CEO of Rook, a data infrastructure company powering the next generation of preventive healthcare.

From martial arts discipline to building one of the most promising health data platforms in the world, Marco shares his entrepreneurial journey, the evolution of wearables, and how clean data and AI are redefining human health.

In this episode of The CTO Show with Mehmet, we dive into one of the most pressing questions of our time: Can privacy survive in the age of AI surveillance? Joining Mehmet is Kee J. , Co-Founder of Session, a decentralized, privacy-first messaging platform built on blockchain technology. Kee breaks down how Session protects users from metadata tracking, how it differs from mainstream encrypted messengers, and why the future of secure communication depends on decentralization and design — not regulation.

In this episode of The CTO Show with Mehmet, we dive into the digital transformation wave reshaping businesses in the UAE and beyond. Mehmet sits down with MOOSSA M ALAVI , Founder & CEO of Techbot ERP, to explore how cloud-based ERP solutions are empowering small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to automate operations, make smarter decisions, and embrace the future of AI-driven business.

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Reach founders, tech leaders, and investors across MENA and beyond through this newsletter and The CTO Show with Mehmet. Let's Talk 

📖 From Nowhere to Next

Every week I share startup lessons and stories through The CTO Show Brief. But if you want to go deeper, my book From Nowhere to Next brings together the experiences and insights that shaped my own journey.

Thanks for reading — and for being part of this growing, global-minded network.

 — Mehmet