Zain Ventures
Scales innovation by investing in the start-up ecosystem
Zain Ventures spearheads company’s investment portfolio, diversifying Zain’s reach and leverage future investment opportunities. Expanding its relationship with regional and international venture capital funds, Zain Ventures continued to diversify its portfolio through direct investments, both internally and externally, offering them access to Zain’s wide geographical reach and expansive customer base.
Having invested approximately USD 156 million by end-2025, Zain Ventures’ portfolio includes:
$
156
M
Zain Ventures invested
1.8
X
Valuation
Indirect Investments
- Valor Fund: Managed by Valor Equity Partners, an operational growth investment firm focused on high-growth companies across different industries and stages of development that includes SpaceX.
- Unbound: A London-based long-term investment firm that partners with entrepreneurs to build “100-year companies.”
- BECO Capital III: Dubai-based and focused on early-stage technology startups.
- Kadmos Capital: London-based investment firm dedicated to finding and backing early-stage, deep-tech entities, and impactful technologies in Europe.
- Colle Capital I: A US-based women-founded venture fund targeting seed and early-stage technology companies in industries such as FinTech, IoT and healthcare. Focuses on ESG-related activities from business practices to economic and environmental impacts.
- Wamda MENA Venture I: Headquartered in Dubai, the fund invests in growth-stage technology companies operating in the MENA region.
- MEVF II: A MENA-centric fund targeting early-stage technologies in new media, e-commerce, and enterprise software as a service (“SaaS”). This fund represents synergies with Zain’s digital health and insuretech plans.
- MEVF III: A growth-stage fund focusing on Series B technology startups in MENA and Turkey.
Direct Investments:
- xAI: An artificial intelligence (AI) company founded by Elon Musk in 2023, best known for its chatbot Grok, and built around a mission to develop AI technologies that advance human understanding and scientific discovery.
- Cohere: A Canadian multinational technology company focused on AI for the enterprise sector, specializing in Large Language Models (LLMs) across 100+ languages. Cohere provides businesses customizable models for unique use cases that can easily be integrated into users’ applications.
- Groq: A US-based technology company specializing in AI inference infrastructure processing through ultra-fast, low-latency inference chips offering a distinct advantage to accelerate AI, machine learning, and high-performance computing workloads.
- Articul8: A US-based entity that offers enterprise customers a full-stack, vertically-optimized and secure generative AI software platform, delivering AI capabilities that keep customer data, training and inference within the enterprise security perimeter.
- Beyond Limit: US AI company founded in 2014, rooted in technologies developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech. The company specializes in Hybrid AI, combining machine learning with symbolic reasoning to deliver explainable, human-like decision-making for industries such as energy, manufacturing, and healthcare.
- Revolut: Established in 2015, a British FinTech company that is expanding across the globe offering comprehensive banking services, adding value to Zain’s FinTech efforts in enhancing the ecosystem across Zain’s footprint.
Internal Initiatives:
ZAINIAC: Zain Group’s internal innovation platform that allows employees to submit, share, and collaborate on new ideas. It was launched to encourage intrapreneurship and creativity within the company. The platform provides mentoring, workshops, and funding for selected ideas to turn them into real business initiatives.
In May 2025, ZAINIAC successfully incubated and funded its first startup, ACTLY, founded by Zain employees, demonstrating commitment to scaling internal innovation. ACTLY is an AI startup delivering personalized customer experiences through AI Agents, providing actionable decision intelligence, combining real-time insights, behavior analytics, and predictive reporting to elevate business decision-making. With the capability to automate over 20,000 monthly conversations, ACTLY empowers organizations to scale effortlessly and meet growing customer expectations with precision.