Cobi for intelligence secures one million dollar seed funding to build artificial intelligence decision layer in the region

Cobi, a customer intelligence company based in the United Arab Emirates, successfully closed a seed financing round of $1 million led by Lunara Partners, an alternative-investment firm with multiple stages that focuses its investments on the Middle East and North Africa. The round also included participation from Plug and Play, Annex Investments and Spring. The company intends to use the proceeds to expand the deployment of its platform with large enterprises in the Middle East and international markets, deepen its capabilities for analyzing customer behavior and recommendation systems, and automate workflow between raw customer data and the executed prescriptive decisions.

Today, organizations handle massive volumes of data and fragmented software, with product behaviors, transactions, marketing campaigns and customer feedback recorded in separate systems, each showing only a specific part of the story.This tool fragmentation generates conflicting signals that often lead to slow manual decisions by teams. Because it takes a long time to reach accurate answers, the optimal opportunity to intervene and engage with the customer at the right moment is lost.

Cobi’s platform, founded in 2024 by Darin Edmond and Botlali Muswani, continuously interprets behavioral and purchase signals and interaction guidance in real time. The platform identifies core shifts in customer preferences, growth opportunities, churn indicators and stages of the customer journey, explains why these changes matter and recommends the best next step, product or offer. Its architecture relies on a continuous cycle of three core pillars: comprehension and understanding by linking signals from the various stages of the customer journey to see the full picture; decision-making through proactive identification of opportunities, risks and behavioral changes and recommendation of the most suitable actions to boost engagement and retention; and finally execution and learning by delivering decisions through existing applications and interaction systems and using the outcomes to improve future recommendations.

Darin Edmond, co-founder and CEO, explains that communication with customers is not a simple binary issue; the highest-spending customer is not necessarily the most loyal or attached to the brand. Most data platforms and current AI systems reduce this complex relationship to predefined deals, scores and signals, even though the precision of these distinctions is essential for building genuine connections. Cobi’s platform builds a sophisticated, ongoing understanding of a company’s customers and the touchpoints that shape their experience, giving marketing and customer-experience teams clear guidance on how to interact, serve and create value for different customer segments.

The company’s founders bring extensive managerial and technical experience from large enterprises. Darin Edmond has ten years of data-driven digital transformation experience, including consulting for European financial institutions while at Deloitte and serving as head of the business sector at Drop. Botlali Muswani, co-founder and CTO, has a decade of experience building and developing technology for startups and global firms such as Amazon Web Services.The company has begun working with prominent organizations such as Mastercard, Emirates Flight Catering, Prismatic AI, a subsidiary of G42, and Larry Exchange. It also recently announced a five-year agreement with iNovate, part of the iFinance group of financial and digital investors, to integrate Cobi’s customer intelligence infrastructure with their digital payment system.

Omar Al-Khawaja, co-founder and managing partner at Lunara Partners, notes that large companies have invested heavily in data-collection and interaction-execution systems, but the decisions linking the two have remained manual and fragmented. Cobi provides the intelligent layer that turns customer signals into tangible, measurable actions, helping companies retain customers they have worked to win and turning behavioral insight into commercial growth. Al-Khawaja added that the team has demonstrated its ability to attract complex institutional clients, expressing confidence that the company’s approach has the ingredients to become a core component of how firms understand, serve and grow with their customers.