UAE customer intelligence startup Cobi raises $1M pre

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Dubai-based customer intelligence startup Cobi has raised $1 million in pre-Seed funding, in a round led by Lunara Partners with participation from Plug and Play, Annex Investments and Spring.

Founded in 2024 by Darren Edmund and Botlhale Mosoane, Cobi is building an intelligence layer between the software companies use to collect customer data and the systems they use to engage customers.

Its platform pulls together behavioural, transactional, product and engagement signals spread across different tools, identifies changes in customer behaviour, explains what may be driving them, and recommends a next action.

The company is targeting the gap between data collection and execution, where customer signals are often spread across multiple systems and reconciled manually before teams decide how to respond.

“The person who spends the most with you isn't necessarily the person with the strongest loyalty or brand affinity,” Edmund said, arguing that many existing customer-data systems still reduce relationships to transactions, segments and scores.

Cobi recently signed a five-year agreement with eNovate, a subsidiary of Egypt’s state-linked eFinance Investment Group, to integrate its technology across eNovate’s digital payments ecosystem. It has also been working with Mastercard, Emirates Flight Catering, Presight AI and Lari Exchange on applications for its customer-intelligence technology.

The new capital will be used to expand enterprise deployments across the Middle East and internationally, and to further develop Cobi’s recommendation and decisioning capabilities.

Edmund previously spent a decade working on data-led digital transformation, including advising European financial institutions at Deloitte and serving as chief business officer at fintech dropp. CTO Mosoane has built and scaled technology across startups and large enterprises, including Amazon Web Services.

The round is also among the early investments from Lunara Partners, the MENA-focused investment firm co-founded by Said Murad and Omar Alkhawaja. Murad was previously a senior partner at Global Ventures for six years, after earlier operating roles at Jamalon and Groupon UAE.

“Enterprises have invested heavily in systems that collect customer data and systems that execute interactions, but the decisions connecting them remain fragmented and manual,” Alkhawaja said, describing Cobi as “the intelligence layer that turns customer signals into clear, measurable action.”