Lune secures 850k pre-seed funding to accelerate expansion in MENA

By Leandra Monteiro

Lune, a UAE-based data start-up co-founded by Helal Tariq Lootah, an Emirati entrepreneur, and Alexandre Soued announced it has successfully raised 850,000 in its pre-seed round backed by Dubai Future District Fund (DFDF), Flat6Labs, and several angel investors.

The company, which unlocks unprecedented insight from consumers’ financial transactions, already operates across the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and will leverage the cash infusion to scale across the entire GCC by the end of the year.

“While the region’s Banking and Finance Institutions are innovating at breakneck speed, the lack of detailed visibility into transactional data presents a formidable barrier to the sector. This lack of visibility prevents consumers from effectively taking control of their spending, and BFSIs from introducing or enhancing services based on customer preferences,” explained Lootah.

“Our success is built on having identified a pressing market gap and addressing it by creating a locally relevant solution. The systems and data processing engines of US and European providers are incompatible with Middle Eastern transactional data, so our offering is truly unique to the region. We are excited about being a key enabler of the ongoing transformation of the MENA’s financial ecosystem,” said Soued.

Fatima Al Naqbi, Chief Innovation Officer at the Ministry of Finance and MBRIF representative, said, “Lune’s ability to raise US$850K in pre-seed funding underlines investor confidence in the UAE entrepreneurship ecosystem’s ability to foster highly innovative and disruptive start-ups that can support the country’s vision of becoming a global hub for the FinTech industry. Lune recently graduated from the Mohammed Bin Rashid Innovation Fund Accelerator program and we are delighted to be an integral part of their journey to make finance simpler and more accessible to people. This is completely aligned with our mission to support the UAE National Innovation Strategy by nurturing entrepreneurs and start-ups that will have a positive economic and social impact.”

Lune is one of the 16 start-ups who have been selected to join Hub71, Abu Dhabi’s global tech ecosystem, as part of its latest cohort of start-ups who chose Abu Dhabi as their launchpad for regional growth. With Hub71’s support, Lune will have the opportunity to accelerate innovation in the UAE’s FinTech sector and benefit from a network of corporate and government partners and investors who can help unlock growth opportunities. Lune will leverage the new capital to grow its sales team, and onboard added technical resources to increase the speed of product development.

“We are witnessing a pivotal shift in the ways that consumers and financial institutions that serve them interact with their data. Lune is a business that aims to capitalise on that shift to provide a more accurate meta-data set to the industry. We see their solution as one that not only improves the accuracy of insights but that will also serve as a core component of every transaction-based business to make data-driven decisions on where to invest their capital to deliver true value to their end-users,” said Amer Fatayer, Investment Director at DFDF.