UAE startup Yozo raises $1.7M pre-seed to build an AI-native revenue engine for e-commerce growth and customer retention.
Yozo, a UAE-based startup building an AI-native platform for e-commerce growth and retention, has raised $1.7 million in a pre-seed funding round as it looks to automate tasks typically handled by dedicated growth and lifecycle marketing teams.
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The round was co-led by Access Bridge Ventures and Disruptech Ventures, with participation from Arzan VC, Oraseya Capital, Plus VC, Suhail Ventures, Glint Ventures, and M-Empire Angels. The company was founded earlier this year by a team that previously built Fatura, an e-commerce and fintech platform acquired by a regional investment bank in 2022.
Yozo is positioning its product as an autonomous “revenue engine” for online merchants, designed to address low conversion rates and weak customer retention—persistent challenges in global e-commerce. Industry data shows that most online stores convert less than 3% of visitors, with significant demand lost between browsing and checkout.
Rather than offering another marketing dashboard, Yozo’s platform uses artificial intelligence to design, launch, and optimize customer engagement campaigns across email, WhatsApp, and SMS. The system automates segmentation, timing, experimentation, and performance measurement, adjusting campaigns in real time based on incremental impact.
Founder Hossam Ali said the complexity of conversion and retention marketing has outpaced the capacity of most internal teams, even when using established tools such as Klaviyo or Mailchimp. “Data, experimentation, timing, and personalization require constant attention. AI now makes it possible to encode that decision-making into software that operates continuously,” he said.
According to the company, Yozo has already helped client brands reach more than 250,000 end customers through automated campaigns within three months of launch. The startup plans to use the new capital to further develop its AI models, expand integrations with major e-commerce platforms, and grow its customer base across the Middle East and international markets.
Investors backing the round said Yozo’s approach reflects a broader shift toward application-layer AI products that embed directly into business workflows. Disruptech Ventures managing partner Mohamed Okasha said the firm had previously worked with the founders and viewed Yozo as addressing a global problem that only recently became solvable with advances in generative AI.
Why Yozo Matters to MENA
For startups, Yozo highlights a growing wave of MENA-based AI companies building globally relevant products at the application layer, rather than competing on foundational models. For investors, the deal reflects rising confidence in repeat founders tackling efficiency gaps in commerce, one of the region’s fastest-growing digital sectors. More broadly, as e-commerce penetration deepens across the Gulf, platforms that improve monetization and retention—rather than just traffic—are becoming critical infrastructure for the region’s digital economy.
