Dubai's Amaani Raises $5M Series A to Take AÏZA Beauty Brand Into Saudi Arabia

Amaani, the Dubai-headquartered consumer company behind the beauty brand AÏZA, has closed a US$5 million Series A round. BECO Capital, a Gulf-focused institutional venture capital firm, led the raise. Homegrown Ventures and Peak XV's Surge took part. With the new capital, Amaani's total funding stands at US$8 million.

The company will spend the money on three things: pushing deeper into the Gulf Cooperation Council, building out its product pipeline, and hiring. Saudi Arabia is the priority. Kuwait and Qatar come next.

AÏZA is set to enter Saudi retail through Ulta Beauty, with launches planned at Red Sea Mall in Jeddah and Riyadh Park in Riyadh at the end of September. Kuwait and Qatar are expected to follow in the fourth quarter of 2026.

The brand itself is young. AÏZA launched in December 2024 with skincare and haircare lines built around ingredients and beauty rituals drawn from the Arab world. Its formulas use dates, black seed, frankincense, rose and bakhoor, and are developed alongside laboratories in Korea, Japan and Italy.

Shubham Poddar, founder and CEO of Amaani, traced the company's origins to his time at Sequoia Capital India, which he left about three years ago. "The Middle East had become one of the world's most sophisticated consumers of global beauty, but too few globally ambitious brands were built around the region's own beauty culture," he said. The raise, he added, lets the company "deepen what we have built in the UAE, expand across the GCC and begin proving that a brand born here can travel far beyond it."

he said. The raise, he added, lets the company

Growth so far has come from a shift out of pure e-commerce. According to the company, AÏZA's net revenue in the first half of 2026 grew more than ninefold compared with the same period a year earlier, a stretch that coincided with its move from a digital-first operation into regional retail. Amaani also runs technology and artificial intelligence across creative testing, customer analytics, performance marketing and operational planning.

Abdulaziz Shikh Al Sagha, Managing Partner at BECO Capital, said the firm had spent years studying the beauty and wellness category in the Gulf and the wider Middle East in search of locally built brands with the operating discipline to scale outside the region. "Amaani combines that discipline with a deep understanding of what regional consumers want," he said. "That combination gave us the conviction to back Shubham and the team at this stage of their journey."