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Retail Enablement Company Zid Raises $50 Million
Saudi-based retail enablement company, Zid, has successfully raised $50 million in a funding drive led by IMPACT46.
Zid, the Saudi Arabian retail enablement company, has seen investment from the likes of Aramco venture capital arm (Waed Ventures) and Endeavor Catalyst in a recent round of fundraising, led by IMPACT46, paving the way for future expansion into new markets and helping to further modernize the retail sector.
The recent funding comes after a string of successes for Zid, after the company doubled its revenues from both subscriptions and transactions, as well as seeing a 50% increase in orders, with 7 million users now having made transactions through the platform.
Zid was created to enable merchants to grow their online selling channels. It is now taking on a broader mission to modernize the entire retail sector, improving efficiencies and helping business owners increase their profits.
The company has rolled out solutions enabling retailers to improve both shipping (ZidShip) and payments (ZidPay) and plans to offer financial and cross-border shipping products in the near future.
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“We appreciate the continuous belief and trust that our investors have put into the company, the leadership, and the team. We are focused on being the regional optimum solution for each economy we operate in, having proved it in Saudi Arabia,” says Sultan AlAsmi, Co-founder and CEO of Zid.
Like international giants such as Shopify, Zid is building a community that enables merchants to master online selling with a full-fledged eCommerce ecosystem equipped with sophisticated features. Unlike larger corporations, however, Zid is focused on fostering deep connections with merchants and strengthening the community as a whole. After completing the recent round of funding with help from asset management and advisory organization IMPACT46, the future looks bright for this progressive retail enablement company.
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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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