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Saudi Catering Supply Startup Kaso Gets $10.5 Million Investment
The B2B restaurant supply chain innovator has launched a new FinTech platform and plans to turn over $1 billion over the next 12 months.
Founded in 2021, Kaso is a Saudi Arabian B2B startup providing supply chain management tools for restaurants. The company already boasts 5,000-plus clients and partners across the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
Kaso has seen strong growth since its founding and already includes notable brands like Burger King, Buffalo Wild Wings, Caribou Coffee, Chili’s, and Tim Hortons in its partner portfolio.
Recently, the startup raised $10.5 million in seed funding, enabling it to add a new FinTech platform to its suite of services that will further boost operations across the Middle East.
The funding round was backed by a range of regional strategic investors and saw international interest from the likes of Germany’s Global Founders Capital and Singapore’s MSA Novo, who both contributed to the startup’s first seed round in 2021, raising $2.1 million.
“It is very encouraging to see strong regional and international investors joining us, especially considering the challenges some startups currently face in the fundraising market,” explained Manar Alkassar, co-founder of Kaso.
Kaso’s primary goal is to “revolutionize” the food supply chain for the catering industry. To that end, the company’s new FinTech platform is intended to streamline operations using a “technology-backed ecosystem” to improve efficiency and transparency while reducing food waste.
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“It will offer payments and credit facilities to restaurants, further solving key challenges in the industry,” Mr. Alkassar said, with Kaso co-founder, Ahmed Soliman, adding: “Our platform has already made a significant impact in reducing inefficiencies in the industry, and we are confident that we can continue to make strides towards a more sustainable future.”
The restaurant procurement sector in the Middle East is a highly competitive industry. In the GCC alone, the market is projected to hit nearly $130 billion by 2029, at a compound annual growth rate of over 6%, according to research firm OCO Global.
News
G42’s Inception42 Wants AI To Show Its Work Before Investors Commit
Launched at SuperReturn Middle East, Alpha is pitched at sovereign wealth funds and private equity firms underwriting bigger deals on tighter timelines.
Inception42, G42’s agentic AI company, believes that institutional investors want AI they can check, not just AI that saves time. Its new tool, Alpha, launched at SuperReturn Middle East, is designed to draft investment memos in which every claim points back to its source.
Alpha is aimed at private equity firms, sovereign wealth funds and institutional allocators, which Inception42 says are underwriting larger, more complex positions under tighter timelines. Most AI tools, it argues, speed up individual tasks such as a memo draft or a comps table but leave the investment strategy scattered across files, inboxes and committee decks.
Teams upload Confidential Information Memoranda, diligence packs and portfolio data, which Alpha turns into insights grounded in that material. It checks how complete the diligence is, flagging gaps before they become late-stage surprises, then scores the deal against criteria the institution sets and drafts the memo.
Sourcing every claim is the core of Inception42’s Alpha pitch. Investment committees, the company says, have little time to challenge the evidence, and the audit trail is meant to give them more certainty. The company also promises institutions proof that their own strategy was applied consistently on every deal.
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“Every investment committee wants the same thing: the full picture of a deal and the confidence to act on it,” says Ashish Koshy, CEO of Inception42. “Alpha gives deal teams and committee members that picture, with every insight traceable to its source, so speed and rigor finally pull in the same direction”.
Alpha is available as SaaS, and investment data, Inception42 says, stays under the institution’s control at every step. Firms can tailor the tool with custom agents, and Alpha Skills will eventually add reusable, practitioner-designed workflows for tasks such as comparables analysis and credit assessment.
The company says Alpha is already proven in the region’s most significant financial institutions. If the tool works as described, committees get an investment memo they can interrogate rather than simply take on trust.
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