News

Taager Secures $6.75M To Expand Social eCommerce In MENA

The Pre-Series B funding round was led by Norrsken22 and will allow the company to enhance the platform while strengthening its data tools and team.

Published

2 years ago

February 11, 2025

Nour Nasir

taager secures $6.75 million to expand social ecommerce in mena

Riyadh-based social eCommerce platform Taager has successfully raised $6.75 million in a Pre-Series B funding round. The investment, led by Africa-focused growth fund Norrsken22, will help the company expand its operations further across the Middle East.

Taager allows would-be entrepreneurs to start their own dropshipping business, providing products, storage, shipping, and customer collection. However, unlike traditional platforms, Taager specializes in “social eCommerce” — a business model where products are bought and sold directly through social media platforms.

Social commerce merges online shopping with social interactions, significantly reshaping traditional online customer journeys. Globally, social eCommerce is projected to generate $2.5 trillion in revenue this year. In the MENA, it has already surpassed $14 billion, accounting for over 30% of all eCommerce sales.

Although MENA’s young, tech-savvy population is already purchasing products via social eCommerce, would-be entrepreneurs often face challenges starting a business in the region. Supply chains are complex, capital is limited, and gaining insights into the diverse range of consumer bases can be tough.

Taager tackles these pain points by offering an all-in-one platform that provides sellers with access to trending products, pricing and marketing insights, logistics solutions, embedded financing, and multi-market payment processing.

Also Read: Top E-Commerce Websites In The Middle East In 2025

Leveraging data gathered from thousands of merchants and millions of customers, Taager also uses machine learning to enhance product recommendations, optimize pricing, and predict buyer behavior. The company is also integrating generative AI into its operations, using AI-driven sales agents to improve efficiency while keeping costs in check.

The eventual goal is to establish Taager as a central hub for demand generation and data-driven decision-making in MENA’s social eCommerce ecosystem. Mohamed Elhorishy, Taager’s Co-founder and CEO, emphasized the company’s ambitious mission: “Our goal is to make it possible for anyone to launch and scale a successful social eCommerce business. We support women, young entrepreneurs, and low-income individuals in building sustainable sources of income. On average, Taager merchants have seen a 2.5x increase in profitability. Our platform has helped thousands achieve financial independence and stability”.

So far, Taager has supported over 45,000 online social sellers. With this latest round of funding, the company plans to strengthen its data tools, expand its product offerings, and grow its expert team to accelerate its regional impact.

News

ESET Bets On Specialized Security AI At 0.5% The Training Cost

ESET says NeoCortex can estimate an attacker’s next move, with a kill switch and human oversight built in to keep it from going rogue.

Published

5 days ago

November 4, 2026

Dana Saadeh

eset bets on specialized security ai at 0.5% the training cost

A sign-in anomaly, a suspicious process launch and an unusual connection may look harmless alone. Together, they can describe an intrusion that is hard for security to teams to piece together.

To solve that problem, ESET announced ESET NeoCortex on November 4, 2026: a specialized foundational AI model for cybersecurity. It powers ESET LiveCortex, available within the ESET PROTECT Platform, which connects fragmented security signals and turns them into actionable incidents.

Filtering is the main selling point, with LiveCortex processing billions of raw telemetry events daily, and just 0.00111% of them contributing to incidents presented to customers. The aim is less alert fatigue and more analyst time spent on threats that matter.

NeoCortex is built on world-model architecture, learning how digital environments behave and how events relate. ESET says that lets it reconstruct missing incident context, recognize similar past cases and estimate an attacker’s likely next step – what the company calls “minus-one-day defense,” a chance to intervene before the next stage unfolds. ESET points to Black October, the week leading up to October 25, 2026, when critical security issues affecting PHP, Linux, GitLab and other key systems demanded rapid, prioritized responses, as the kind of moment where that context matters.

ESET’s internal research also suggests a specialized model like NeoCortex can be trained at up to 200 times lower cost than a large general reasoning model, while delivering more accurate, defense-focused results. The company credits optimized training, a focus on cybersecurity vocabulary, lower computing requirements and privately owned hardware.

Also Read: Dubai Says Its Deepfake Detector Needs Just 7 Seconds Of Video

“AI is accelerating both cyberattacks and cyberdefenses. With ESET NeoCortex, we are applying our AI investment to develop specialized foundational cybersecurity intelligence that remains under our control and strengthens, rather than replaces, human expertise,” said Juraj Malcho, Chief Technology Officer at ESET.

As part of the design, NeoCortex forms part of a layered architecture combining specialized models, deterministic controls, correlation logic, validation, auditability and expert human oversight. Safeguards include restricted sandboxes, read-only tools, continuous monitoring, defined usage and token limits, a kill switch and human oversight of critical response decisions. The model is also developed and self-hosted on ESET’s own infrastructure, which the company says reduces exposure to shifts among third-party AI providers, including commercial and geopolitical ones.