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The Venture Codex

COTU Ventures

Building 12, City Walk, 12 Al Raya Street, G Floor, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Overview

COTU Ventures is a leading seed-stage venture firm in the Middle East. We partner with incredible founders at the beginning of their journey; taking companies from Pre-seed through to Series A and beyond, accelerating their path to product-market fit, and ensuring that they get access to the right capital and expertise along the way.

Total investments
14
Lead investments
5
Investments · 12mo
7
Active investors
1

Sector focus

  • Finance
  • Venture Capital
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Investment portfolio

  • Stitch

    Participated · Series A · May 2026

    Stitch offers a single, cloud-native stack that spans lending, cards, payments, and ledgers, enabling financial institutions to adopt modules gradually without ripping out existing systems. Built by operators with experience at NPCI, FIS, Barclays, Santander, and Azentio, the platform is positioned as a modern system of record to enable institutions to adopt AI and launch products faster. In the six months prior to the announcement, more than $5 billion was transacted on Stitch’s platform. The company reported customer numbers grew 10x in 2025 and revenue grew 20x in the same period. Stitch currently serves customers across the GCC, Africa (including Egypt and Kenya), and Southeast Asia, with named customers including Raya Financing, LuLu Exchange, Noqodi, and Foodics. The company plans to continue expanding with the goal of servicing financial institutions worldwide.

  • Safqah Capital

    Participated · Seed · Feb 2026

    Founded in 2023 by Abdullah Alsubaie, Karim Merie, Abdulmalik Alothman and Omar Alessa, Safqah Capital offers a digital platform that connects individual and corporate investors with SME real-estate developers through Sharia-compliant, debt-based crowdfunding instruments. The company specializes in structuring Sukuk to finance land purchases and project development, giving developers access to alternative capital while opening real-estate investment opportunities to a broader investor base. Over its first 18 months, Safqah has financed more than 70 development projects with an aggregate value exceeding $800 million across Saudi Arabia. Its platform combines fintech and proptech capabilities and plans to integrate advanced AI-driven risk assessment and underwriting tools. The firm intends to expand its financing capacity and further scale its technology infrastructure with the newly raised capital. Safqah’s model targets the growing demand for transparent, Sharia-compliant real-estate financing solutions in the GCC. The company is headquartered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

  • Qureos

    Participated · Seed · Feb 2026

    Qureos is a Dubai, UAE-based company offering an AI-driven hiring platform that automates sourcing, screening and interviewing for enterprise recruiters. Its technology matches candidates to roles across the broader market by analysing fit and growth potential, aiming to shorten time-to-hire and improve placement quality. Built in the Middle East, the platform already serves customers and candidates across MENA and in the United States. The company was founded by Alexander Epure and Usama Nini. Qureos plans to deepen its artificial-intelligence capabilities, enlarge its go-to-market organisation and expand geographically through enterprise and agency partnerships. The recently raised US$5 million seed round provides the financial runway to execute these initiatives.

  • Mznil

    Participated · Series A · Nov 2025

    Founded in 2024 by Abdulmajeed Al-Babtain and Abdulrahman Al-Shaya, Mznil offers a technology-enabled platform that develops and operates purpose-built accommodation for labor forces. The company supplies turnkey housing across more than 13 Saudi cities, managing an operational network of over 60 buildings. Its client roster exceeds 100 corporations, including Smasco, EFSIM, Barq, and Sixt, underscoring early market traction in multiple sectors. Mznil’s core product centers on end-to-end housing services that match corporate demand with compliant, high-quality residences. With fresh capital, the firm plans to co-develop a 22,000-square-meter site that will add six new workforce-housing properties in partnership with local landowners. This expansion aims to deepen its geographic reach and scale its asset base to meet growing demand. Although revenue figures are not disclosed, the company’s rapid footprint growth suggests a capital-intensive but potentially defensible operating model.

  • Kingpin

    Participated · Seed · Nov 2025

    Kingpin provides a B2B SaaS platform that unifies product information, pricing, customer discovery, and sales processes within a single AI-powered ecosystem. Its technology leverages artificial intelligence to clean and enrich product data, automate repetitive sales tasks, and surface new retail opportunities worldwide. The company currently serves more than 300 distributors and brands across beauty, fashion, sports, and other consumer-goods verticals. Headquartered in Dubai with an office in Abu Dhabi, Kingpin positions itself as an operating system for global wholesale distribution. Management plans to use newly raised capital to deepen engineering resources, expand AI capabilities, and broaden geographic coverage from the Middle East into Europe and North America. The company’s revenue or user growth figures were not disclosed, but the seed financing marks its first publicly announced round and underscores investor confidence in its go-to-market traction.

Team