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Anghami Acquires Spotlight Events To Expand Its Footprint
If everything goes according to plan, the acquisition should help Anghami further increase its growing revenue, which reached $35.5 million in 2021.
UAE-based Anghami, the first music-streaming platform in the MENA region, has recently announced the acquisition of Dubai-based Spotlight Events, a live events and concert company.
The acquisition is supposed to help Anghami expand its footprint in the music and entertainment ecosystem by bridging the gap between online and offline entertainment.
Eddy Maroun
“Our vision is to expand from music streaming to a fully integrated entertainment platform that meets our goal of building our unique category that no other provider can compete with,” explained Eddy Maroun, Co-founder and CEO of Anghami.
Maher Khawkhaji, Founder and CEO of Spotlight, believes that Anghami’s reach, data, and technical capabilities will allow Spotlight Events to bring the best to music fans, artists, and brands.
In addition to promoting upcoming concerts and making it easy for users to purchase tickets through Spotlight Events, Anghami will also take advantage of its live video streaming capabilities to deliver concerts as immersive virtual reality experiences.
If everything goes according to plan, the acquisition should help Anghami further increase its growing revenue, which reached $35.5 million in 2021, with the overall gross margin reaching 25.5 percent.
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“Maher has built a great business on solid economics and has proven that live concerts and events are a scalable and profitable business,” said Maroun.
Earlier this year, Anghami became the first Arab tech company to be listed on NASDAQ New York via a merger with Vistas Media Acquisition Company Inc., a publicly-traded special purpose acquisition company. The music-streaming platform is traded under the symbol “ANGH.”
Just like most other tech companies, Anghami is currently not doing well on the stock market. Right now, shares of Anghami are being traded for around $4.30 a piece, a significant decline from the all-time high of $28.88 back in February.
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At I/O 2026, Sundar Pichai Concedes AI Must Deliver Real Value
Gemini 3.5, a personal agent called Spark, agentic shopping, and Android XR eyewear are all aimed at making AI feel useful, not just impressive.
Google’s annual I/O developer conference (I/O 2026) has recently become a status update on the same question: can the company turn its AI spending into products people use every day? This year, chief executive Sundar Pichai described Google as being in a phase of hyper progress, while conceding this is the part of the cycle where people want to see real value in the products they use on a day-to-day basis.
The strategy on display was to push agents — AI systems that act on a user’s behalf — into nearly every Google product at once. Search now has an “intelligent search box” that returns generated explainer videos alongside links. Gmail, Docs, YouTube and Maps are gaining their own agent layers, including a Docs Live feature that turns spoken instructions into drafted text with citations.
Two new models, Gemini 3.5 and a cheaper Gemini 3.5 Flash, arrived the same day. Google says 900 million people now use Gemini, and that more than 50 billion images have been generated with it. The pricing tier names are likely to confuse buyers: a new AI Ultra plan launches at $100 a month, while the older Gemini AI Ultra drops from $250 to $200.
The flashier announcements were Gemini Omni, a video generator pitched as a more realistic answer to OpenAI’s discontinued Sora 2, and Gemini Spark, a personal agent that handles recurring tasks across a user’s Google account. A new universal shopping cart lets agents complete purchases across multiple retailers from inside Google itself, placing the company between the merchant and the buyer, and also owning the checkout.
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Google also confirmed its Android XR eyewear, built with Samsung and frames from Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. Audio-only glasses ship this autumn; a display-equipped version, which would superimpose live translations into the wearer’s field of view, is still in development. Both sets translate, however only the display version shows you the result.
What Pichai did not resolve is the bargain underneath all this. An agent is only useful to the degree it knows your calendar, your inbox, your shopping history and your physical surroundings. Google has now confirmed that, in time, the same context may carry advertising.
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