Dubai-based Cobi, an AI decision stack for customer intelligence, has raised $1 million in pre-seed funding led by Lunara Partners, with Plug and Play, Annex Investments and Spring also participating.
Cobi reads customer and product data in real time, identifies what is changing, and recommends what to do next, then delivers that decision through the systems a team already uses. Its customers include Emirates, and it recently signed a five-year agreement with eNovate, a subsidiary of eFinance Investment Group, to integrate its intelligence across a digital payment ecosystem.
The pitch: fragmented data, late answers
Companies have more data and software than ever, but product behaviour, transactions, campaign performance and feedback still live in separate systems, each showing one slice of the customer story. By the time a team has reconciled the dashboards, the moment to intervene has passed.
“Connecting with customers isn’t binary,” said Darren Edmund, co-founder and CEO. “The person who spends the most with you isn’t necessarily the person with the strongest loyalty or brand affinity.”
Edmund came from Deloitte and was chief business officer at dropp; CTO Botlhale Mosoane spent a decade at Amazon Web Services. Lunara’s write-up puts it more bluntly: enterprises are data-rich but decision-poor.
Where the $1 million goes
Cobi will use the round to automate more of the work between raw customer signal and executed decision, deepen its recommendation and decisioning capabilities, and speed up enterprise deployments across the Middle East and beyond.
Founded in 2025, Cobi is headquartered in Dubai’s DIFC as part of the Dubai AI Campus initiative, with commercial activity spanning the UAE, Egypt, Bahrain and the wider GCC. It runs within the Mastercard Engage, Presight and Nvidia Inception programmes.
What it means for UAE businesses
For local enterprises the pitch is familiar: the customer data is there, the decision layer is not. Cobi’s bet is that the answer should arrive before the customer moves on — and it is one of several AI bets to land in Dubai this year, alongside the agentic platform built by EmergentOS, the Mastercard-backed Dubai Founders HQ and a $150 million film-IP tokenisation fund.
What is Cobi?
Cobi is a Dubai-based AI decision stack for customer intelligence. It reads customer and product data in real time, identifies meaningful changes, and recommends what to do next through the tools a business already uses.
Who led Cobi’s $1 million pre-seed round?
Lunara Partners, a UAE-based multi-stage alternative investment firm, led the round. Plug and Play, Annex Investments and Spring also participated.
What will Cobi do with the funding?
Cobi will automate more of the work between raw customer signal and executed decision, deepen its recommendation and decisioning capabilities, and accelerate enterprise deployments across the Middle East and international markets.
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