The CTO Show Brief: Issue 147

Author

Mehmet Gonullu
November 30, 2025

Welcome to Issue 147 of The CTO Show Brief!

This week brought a clear dual signal. Across the MEA region, capital is accelerating into hard tech, AI infrastructure, and sovereign innovation with new funds from Dubai to Jordan to Morocco, alongside standout rounds in robotics, regtech, proptech, and sustainability. At the same time, the global landscape is moving into an industrial AI phase, where national missions, energy consolidation, and autonomous agents are reshaping competitive advantage. Together, these trends show a converging reality: MEA is scaling its ecosystem just as the world enters a new era defined by infrastructure, deeptech, and real-world execution.

Whether you’re one of our 2,841 subscribers or a first-time reader—grab your coffee, and let’s dive into what’s shaping tech and venture this week!

 MEA Tech & VC Roundup

VC Funds and Investments

  • FAST Ventures Launches USD 3M FAST Foundry Fund to Back MENA Startups: Dubai-based FAST Ventures has launched a $3 million FAST Foundry fund as a venture studio to support early-stage MENA startups in AdTech, retail, AI, and marketing, offering not just capital but operational resources like workspaces in Dubai or Riyadh and access to specialized teams. The initiative targets tech-culture-commerce intersections to combat high startup failure rates in the region. It emphasizes emerging verticals like FinTech and PropTech to drive traction.

  • Propeller launches $50 million AI-focused fund bridging MENA talent with US markets: Jordan-based Propeller has unveiled its $50 million Fund III to invest in US and MENA AI infrastructure and software startups, already deploying into five US-focused companies like Codemod and Ciphero AI. Backed by Saudi Venture Capital Company, the fund bridges regional talent with Silicon Valley to foster global growth. It builds on prior investments in over 30 startups with international potential.

  • $269M Catalytic Fund Launches in Morocco to Boost VC & Startup Growth: Morocco's government, via the Ministry of Digital Transition and partners like the Mohammed VI Investment Fund, has launched a $269 million fund-of-funds to catalyze VC in fintech, agritech, and climate tech startups at pre-seed to Series A stages. The initiative includes risk coverage to attract investors and address funding gaps in the ecosystem. It aims to scale Morocco's startup scene through targeted capital deployment.

  • SVC deploys $267 million into US funds to boost Saudi–US investment partnership: Saudi Venture Capital Co. (SVC) has committed $267 million across 17 US-managed VC and PE funds focusing on AI, advanced tech, and digital economy startups, aligning with Vision 2030's diversification goals. The move strengthens Saudi-US ties and positions the Kingdom as a private capital hub in MENA. It emphasizes late-stage growth financing and cross-border knowledge transfer.

  • Morocco Launches State-Backed Mechanism to Close Funding Gap in Startup Ecosystem: Under Digital Morocco 2030, a $39 million catalytic fund with first-loss coverage has been introduced by the Mohammed VI Fund and Tamwilcom to draw VC into seed and growth-stage startups, targeting 3,000 new ventures and $753 million in mobilized capital by 2030. This addresses volatile local funding, which hit $93 million in 2023 before dipping. The effort seeks to spawn unicorns in emerging markets through private-public coordination.

  • Qatar invests in UK quantum VC fund Firgun Ventures: Qatar Investment Authority has backed Firgun Ventures' $70 million debut fund (aiming for $250 million total) to finance early-stage UK quantum computing startups, leveraging the region's 64 dedicated firms despite capital shortages. While UK-centric, QIA's involvement signals MEA sovereign wealth interest in emerging tech ecosystems. The fund plans immediate deployments to bolster quantum innovation.

M&A and Exits

  • Getir Yemek sold to Uber Eats, Competition Authority process begins: Abu Dhabi-based Mubadala has agreed in principle to sell Turkish food delivery platform Getir Yemek to Uber Eats, pending Turkish Competition Authority approval, as part of Getir's restructuring and exit from the market. This follows Uber's acquisition of 85% of rival Trendyol GO and accelerates sales of Getir's other units like vehicle and finance arms. The deal strengthens Uber's dominance in Turkey's competitive delivery sector within emerging markets.

Startup Funding and Launches

  • Buildroid emerges from stealth with $2 million pre-seed investment: US-based Buildroid AI, founded in 2025, raised $2 million in pre-seed funding led by Tim Draper to deploy AI robotics in UAE's $42.75 billion construction sector, piloting block-laying tech to tackle labor shortages. Co-founders Slava Solonitsyn and Anton Glance eye expansion into MENA's $401.2 billion market by 2030. The funds will scale pilots and partnerships with regional contractors.

  • STAMP raises $2 million pre-seed to build AI-powered compliance platform: Saudi regtech startup STAMP secured $2 million in pre-seed funding to enhance its AI platform for regulatory compliance, licensing, and corporate services across Saudi authorities. Founded in 2021 by Muyasser Albar and Mohammed Zarei, the tool optimizes governance amid evolving MENA regulations. Backers include undisclosed investors supporting regional regtech growth.

  • Saudi proptech Mznil closes $11.7 million Series A: Saudi proptech Mnzil raised $11.7 million in Series A led by Founders Fund—its first Saudi deal—with COTU Ventures, to scale worker-housing solutions including a new 22,000-sqm development site. Founded in 2024, the platform aligns with Vision 2030's ecosystem push. The funding draws global eyes to Saudi's proptech boom.

  • Revibe lands $17 million to accelerate sustainable electronics adoption in MENA: UAE's Revibe raised $17 million led by Partech, building on its $7 million Series A, to expand its refurbished electronics marketplace across Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, and South Africa with enhanced quality controls. Founded in 2022 by Abdessamad Benzakour and Hamza Iraqui, the B2C platform promotes sustainability via warranties and pricing. Funds target Gulf and emerging market growth.

  • Strataphy secures $6 million to power next-generation cooling systems: Saudi deeptech firm Strataphy raised $6 million in seed funding from Outliers VC, Shorooq, and PlusVC to deploy geothermal cooling for data centers and cities in MENA's hot climates, where it eats 50% of power. The tech targets AI and gigaprojects amid a $120 billion market. Expansion focuses on Saudi and UAE deployments.

  • Mastiska closes $10 million seed to advance sovereign silicon for AI compute: UAE semiconductor startup Mastiska raised $10 million in seed from GCC sovereign funds to build open-source AI inference chips, reducing reliance on foreign suppliers for sovereign clients in GCC, South Asia, and Global South. Founded in 2024 by Suresh Sugumar, it prioritizes UAE-based silicon with cybersecurity audits. Funds enable FPGA card launches.

  • erad secures $125 million facility from Jefferies: Saudi embedded-finance platform erad landed a $125 million scalable facility from Jefferies and Channel Capital—Jefferies' first major GCC SME deal—to offer Sharia-compliant capital to SMEs in manufacturing and logistics. Following $16 million pre-Series A and $33 million debt rounds, it has processed SAR 250M amid a $250 billion regional gap. Founded in 2022, erad eyes Vision 2030 expansion.

  • Candi Solar Raises $58.5 Million in IFC-Led Funding Round: Switzerland's Candi Solar secured $58.5 million in IFC-led debt, including climate finance, to scale solar projects in India and South Africa, doubling its 220 MW portfolio for clients like Toyota. Total capital hits $200 million, targeting 400 MWp by 2026. The raise underscores institutional backing for distributed renewables in emerging markets.

Corporate VC and Ecosystem Initiatives

  • Aramco Ventures Establishes European AI Hub in Paris, Signaling Major Investment Push: Saudi Aramco Ventures will open a Paris office in 2026 with hundreds of millions in euros for AI, cybersecurity, and quantum investments in industrial apps, partnering with European startups like Mistral AI. The hub drives energy transformation under Vision 2030, linking MENA diversification to global tech. It fosters cross-regional collaborations.

  • Techstars Startup Weekend İstanbul: Yapay Zeka Temalı Girişimcilik Maratonu Başlıyor: Techstars has launched an Istanbul office to connect Turkish startups to its 20,000+ global network, kicking off with the Dec 5–7, 2025, AI-themed Startup Weekend at Bilişim Vadisi for idea validation and prototyping. Participants can win up to 50,000 TL prizes plus Vibe Coding training. The event targets emerging market AI innovation from ideation to scale.

  • Humanoid, QSS AI & Robotics unveil MENA’s first robotics showroom in Riyadh: UK firm Humanoid and Saudi's QSS AI & Robotics opened Riyadh's first humanoid robotics showroom, demoing the HMND 01 robot with a pre-order for 10,000 units over five years and local assembly. Targeting manufacturing and logistics, it supports Vision 2030 as Saudi's robotics market grows to $543.7 million by 2033. The partnership accelerates MENA adoption.

  • Strataphy closes $6mln funding round to power MENA’s next-generation cooling systems: Saudi's Strataphy raised $6 million in seed from Outliers VC, Shorooq, and PlusVC to scale cooling tech for AI and data centers in MENA's $120 billion market, cutting 50% energy use in hot climates. The full-service platform boosts efficiency amid industrial growth. Funds drive UAE and Saudi rollouts.

 

Global Tech & VC Pulse

The experimental phase of AI is over. This week marks the definitive pivot from software capabilities to the physical, sovereign, and financial infrastructure required to sustain the next decade of technological supremacy—and the capital is moving accordingly.

The Big Picture

The central thesis emerging from this week's deal flow: convergence. Sovereign states are adopting startup-like agility via national missions. Utilities are merging to become tech-infrastructure proxies. Software agents are evolving to perform physical and economic labor. We're watching the AI economy go industrial.

The Sovereign AI Pivot

The U.S. government has officially entered the AI race—not as regulator, but as primary competitor and customer.

Genesis Mission: President Trump signed an Executive Order on November 24 establishing what's being called a "Manhattan Project for computation." The directive connects the DOE's seventeen national laboratories into a unified, AI-driven scientific discovery engine with one goal: double American R&D productivity within a decade.

The strategic logic is straightforward: commercial AI models are hitting a data plateau—trained on the open web, a corpus increasingly saturated with synthetic data. The federal government, meanwhile, holds exabytes of proprietary, high-fidelity data from decades of physical experimentation at Fermilab, Idaho National Lab, and Oak Ridge. That's the new moat.

Amazon's $50B bet: AWS simultaneously committed $50 billion to expand AI and supercomputing infrastructure for U.S. government agencies—adding nearly 1.3 gigawatts of new power capacity across AWS Top Secret, AWS Secret, and AWS GovCloud. Amazon is effectively privatizing the CapEx required to modernize federal IT while capturing long-term contract revenue.

The Energy Singularity

The most critical constraint on AI growth is no longer silicon—it's electricity.

Constellation Energy agreed to acquire Calpine Corporation for $26.6 billion (73% stock, 27% cash), creating a combined 60-gigawatt generation portfolio—the undisputed leader in U.S. clean and dispatchable power.

The portfolio is purpose-built for hyperscale data centers: Constellation's nuclear fleet provides 24/7 carbon-free baseload; Calpine's natural gas plants offer instant flexibility for demand spikes; and the acquisition includes The Geysers in California—the world's largest geothermal complex.

Context: Earlier in November, the DOE finalized a $1 billion loan to Constellation to restart the Crane Clean Energy Center (formerly Three Mile Island Unit 1), backed by a 20-year PPA with Microsoft for its AI data centers.

Agents Take Over

The application layer is shifting from chatbots (text generators) to agents (task executors).

OpenAI Shopping Research: Launched November 24 for all logged-in users, this autonomous agent is powered by a fine-tuned GPT-5 mini model optimized for low latency and complex decision-making. It doesn't just output lists—it interviews users to clarify constraints, browses live web data, and generates structured Buyer's Guides. Post-trained via reinforcement learning to distinguish expert reviews from SEO spam.

Microsoft/NVIDIA Agentic Launchpad: A new UK/Ireland accelerator (applications closed November 28) focused on "Action AI"—systems that negotiate quotes, optimize supply chains, and resolve tickets without human oversight. Microsoft provides Azure; NVIDIA provides Blackwell/H100 compute.

Google's response: Gemini 3 Pro (preview) introduces "Deep Think" reasoning capabilities and Google Antigravity, a development platform for agentic applications.

Fintech: The Merger and the Hack

The crypto-corporate bridge faced a stress test.

The deal: Naver Financial agreed to acquire Dunamu (operator of Upbit, South Korea's largest crypto exchange) for $10.3 billion (15.1 trillion won) in a share-swap transaction. The strategy: integrate Upbit's crypto rails with Naver Pay's 30 million users, then pursue a NASDAQ IPO.

The hack: The next day, Upbit detected abnormal withdrawals—$30 million in Solana and other tokens drained from hot wallets. South Korean authorities linked the attack to the Lazarus Group, North Korea's state-sponsored cyber unit.

Market backdrop: Investors withdrew $3.5 billion from U.S. Spot Bitcoin ETFs in November—the worst monthly outflow since FTX's collapse.

Bio-Computing Breaks Through

While LLMs dominate headlines, "Large Biological Models" are achieving breakthroughs that will reshape healthcare.

popEVE: Harvard Medical School published in Nature Genetics detailing a transformer-based model that predicts the disease potential of genetic variants. It assigns "pathogenicity scores" to every possible variant in the human genome, distinguishing fatal childhood diseases from milder adult-onset effects. The team claims it outperforms DeepMind's AlphaMissense on key benchmarks.

Function Health: Closed a $298 million Series B led by Redpoint Ventures. The company offers subscription-based access to 100+ lab tests with an AI layer that interprets trends and flags anomalies before symptoms appear. Celebrity investors include Matt Damon and Zac Efron.

The Bottom Line

This is the week AI hype transformed into industrial policy. We're no longer talking about chatbots writing poems. We're talking about sovereign states nationalizing scientific discovery (Genesis Mission), utilities merging to power gigawatt-scale data centers (Constellation/Calpine), agents replacing search engines (OpenAI Shopping), and biological models replacing clinical guesswork (popEVE).

For investors, the signal is clear: value is migrating to infrastructure (energy, GovCloud, robotics) and application agents that perform high-value labor. The middle ground—generic SaaS and simple information retrieval—is being hollowed out.

The Industrial AI era has arrived. It's powered by nuclear reactors, protected by national labs, and executed by autonomous agents.

 

🎙️Episodes Recap:

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In this conversation, Jonathan M Kvarfordt, MBA breaks down the real state of AI adoption in GTM, why most revenue teams are still “stuck in the basics,” and how leaders can shift from dashboards to intelligence. He explains why CRM data hygiene is dead, how operational AI works behind the scenes, and what it truly means to run an AI native revenue team.

In this episode, Mehmet sits down with Radhika Dutt , author of Radical Product Thinking, to explore why OKRs and traditional performance frameworks often collapse under the realities of modern work. Radhika introduces OLA, a new approach built on puzzle-solving, continuous learning, and adaptability — designed for today’s fast-moving product, engineering, and startup environments.

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📖 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