112 million dollars close Nclude fund: liquidity to link AI companies between Cairo and the Gulf

We have been tracking in the venture capital landscape of the Middle East and North Africa the announcement of the final closing of the Nclude fund, exceeding $112 million, managed by DPI Venture Capital, in a move that redraws the financing map for tech companies between Egypt, the Gulf and Africa. This closing confirms the maturity of the structural shift the fund has undergone since its launch in Egypt in 2022, and its move of investment advisory management in 2025 to the venture-capital platform of Development Partners International (DPI), where the firm broadened its limited-partner investor base to secure disciplined liquidity targeting fintech, financial inclusion and AI applications.

The fund’s operating model bridges the financing gap between early-stage founding and advanced regional expansion through investment tickets ranging from $500,000 to $10 million.These allocations cover a company’s growth path from founding through the third round (Series C), while keeping Egypt as the primary market and initial launch platform, and allocating 30 percent of the investment mandate to opportunities outside the Egyptian market across Africa and the Middle East. Platform leadership, represented by managing partner Ashley Lewis and general partner Mohamed Al-Adel, explains that the fund focuses on enabling promising entities to transcend their local market boundaries and to link trade and payments flows between Cairo, the Gulf states and African markets.

The fund has deployed its capital to 15 start-ups across the region so far, revealing clear priorities that combine payment infrastructure with sector-specific AI applications. The portfolio includes the Egyptian payments company Paymob, active in the UAE and the Gulf, which raised $35 million in a pre-Series C round led by Mubadala and the European Investment Bank; the proptech firm Nawy, which closed a first-round financing of $52 million to expand in the Middle East; and the FlapKap platform, based in the UAE, which raised $34 million to fund small businesses and expand its Gulf operations. Investments also include the Money Fellows platform, which secured $13 million for financial inclusion in North Africa, including Morocco; the AI-enabled health-care company Kera in Senegal and Ivory Coast; and the Accord Partners project, specializing in unifying AI applications for accounting and audit with a direct focus on Saudi Arabia and the Middle East.

The sector-level distribution of the portfolio shows that the investment bet does not chase generative speculative models, but rather heads toward automating financial processes and auditing corporate data, where the actual value lies.Leadership of Development Partners International, represented by CEO Sofian Lahmar and partner Ashley Lewis, affirms that the fund’s reaching over $112 million gives the platform financial strength suitable for the current market size to invest disciplinedly in affordable health insurance, credit access for small companies, and savings and investment tools for individuals. This vision aligns with statements from general partner Mohamed Al-Adel, who sees the expansion of companies between Egypt, the Gulf and Africa as reflecting a growing demand to establish regional tech entities with operational efficiency capable of serving a broad segment of users.

This financing creates a new reality for technology managers and business leaders in the Gulf, Egypt and the Arab East. For start-ups, the presence of liquidity that follows growth rounds protects Egyptian companies from a forced halt at the limits of the local currency and gives them a bridging platform to the Gulf market with solutions ready to integrate compliance and invoicing requirements. At the same time, Gulf companies and financial offices find an increasing array of options to adopt smart accounting and audit software specially designed to fit the regional work environment and regulatory systems, rather than relying exclusively on costly Western platforms that require complex modifications. The shift also forces engineering teams to develop advanced skills in building multi-currency, multi-jurisdiction software architectures capable of handling payment and credit flows through APIs with high security and reliability.

We see in the closing of Nclude a clear sign of the actual path venture capital is taking in the region; the ability to persist and build real value does not stem from merely replicating generic APIs, but from employing AI and automation at the core of the financial and commercial infrastructure that links regional markets.