UAE startup Cobi raises $1M pre-seed led by Lunara Partners

Cobi, a UAE-based customer intelligence startup, has raised $1 million in a pre-seed round led by Lunara Partners, an alternative investment firm focused on the Middle East and North Africa. Plug and Play, Annex Investments, and Spring also participated.

The company was founded in 2024. Its co-founders are Darren Edmund, who serves as chief executive, and Botlhale Mosoane, the chief technology officer.

Edmund's background is in data-driven digital transformation. He spent a decade in that field and advised European financial institutions while at Deloitte, before serving as chief business officer at dropp. Mosoane has a decade of experience building and scaling technology, including a stint at Amazon Web Services.

Cobi's platform applies AI to behavioral, transactional, product, and engagement data. It reads customer signals in real time, catching changes in preference, growth, disengagement, and journey progression. The system then explains why those changes matter and recommends a next best action, one that can shift as new signals arrive.

The product runs on a continuous decision cycle with three steps: understand, decide, and act and learn. The loop is meant to keep the picture of a customer moving instead of fixed in a static report.

Edmund argues the point of that loop is to resist a common failure in customer analytics. Connecting with customers is not a binary question, he says. The biggest spender may not hold the strongest loyalty or brand affinity. Most data platforms, in his view, flatten relationships into transactions and predefined signals. Cobi is designed to build an evolving understanding of customers and the touchpoints that shape them.

The new capital is earmarked for enterprise deployments in the Middle East and internationally. Cobi also plans to deepen its customer intelligence and recommendation capabilities, and to automate more of the workflow between raw customer data and business decisions.

Omar Alkhawaja, co-founder and managing partner at Lunara Partners, said the problem Cobi addresses is visible across enterprises: decisions that connect customer data to execution remain fragmented and manual. He described the startup as an intelligence layer that turns customer signals into measurable action. He also credited Edmund and the team with an ability to win complex enterprise customers.

Cobi has a track record that backs that claim. It has worked with Mastercard, Emirates Flight Catering, Presight AI (a G42 company), and Lari Exchange. In a separate announcement, the company said it signed a five-year agreement with eNovate, a subsidiary of eFinance Investment Group, to integrate Cobi's intelligence into eNovate's digital payment ecosystem.

The round lands in a specific context. Most enterprises already sit on large volumes of customer data; the missing piece is a mechanism that converts signals into decisions without manual intervention. Cobi's answer is to place that layer inside the systems where decisions happen, which is exactly what the eNovate agreement does for a digital payment stack. The funding gives it room to repeat the pattern beyond the Middle East.