Dubai, United Arab Emirates – Lune – a UAE-based data startup founded by Helal Tariq Lootah, an Emirati entrepreneur, and Alexandre Soued – announced today that it has raised USD 850,000 in its pre-seed round backed by Dubai Future District Fund (DFDF), Flat6Labs and several angel investors. The company, which unlocks unprecedented insights from consumers’ financial transactions, already operates across the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and will leverage the cash infusion to scale across the GCC by the end of the year.
“While the region’s banking and financial institutions are innovating at breakneck speed, the lack of detailed visibility into transaction data poses a formidable barrier to the sector. This lack of visibility prevents consumers from effectively taking control of their spending, and BFSIs from introducing or improving services based on customer preferences,” explained Lootah.
Lune is the region’s first data startup focused entirely on democratizing financial data and enabling institutions to empower the communities they serve. Using proprietary artificial intelligence to convert raw customer payment and transaction data into valuable data points, the company enables BFSIs to offer more curated, high-value financial services. The technology is localized to the MENA region, considering data points ranging from regional tags to Arabic text identification. Lune is currently working with various clients in the UAE, KSA, Oman, Bahrain and Qatar.
“Our success is based on having identified an urgent market gap and addressing it by creating a locally relevant solution. The systems and data processing engines of US and European vendors are incompatible with transactional data from the Middle East, so our offering is truly unique to the region. We are excited about to be a key enabler of the ongoing transformation of the MENA financial ecosystem,” said Soued.
Fatima Al Naqbi, Chief Innovation Officer of the Ministry of Finance and MBRIF representative, said: “Lune’s ability to raise USD 850,000 in pre-seed funding underscores investor confidence in the UAE entrepreneurship ecosystem’s ability to foster highly innovative and disruptive startups that can support the country’s vision to become a global hub for the FinTech industry Lune recently graduated from the Mohammed Bin Rashid Innovation Fund Accelerator program and we are excited to be an integral part of their journey to make funding easier and more accessible to people. This is fully in line with our mission to support the UAE’s national innovation strategy by nurturing entrepreneurs and start-ups that will have a positive economic and social impact.”
Lune is one of the 16 startups that have been selected to join Hub71, Abu Dhabi’s global technology ecosystem, as part of the latest group of startups to choose Abu Dhabi as their launch platform for regional growth. With Hub71’s support, Lune will have the opportunity to accelerate innovation in the UAE’s FinTech sector and benefit from a network of corporate and government partners and investors who can help unlock growth opportunities.
In addition to joining Hub71, Lune was also part of Cycle 3 of the Flat6Labs Ignite program, a partnership between ADQ’s Disrupt AD and Flat6Labs. As part of their participation, Lune’s management team has been extensively mentored by leading entrepreneurship experts over the past four months. This allowed the company to streamline its operations, improve its value proposition, and fine-tune its marketing and expansion strategy, making it ready for its successful pre-seed funding round. Lune will use the new capital to expand the sales team, and on board add technical resources to speed up product development.
“We are witnessing a key shift in the way consumers and the financial institutions that serve them interact with their data. Lune is a business that aims to capitalize on this shift to provide a more accurate set of metadata to the industry. We see their solution as not not only improves the accuracy of insights, but will also serve as a core component of any transaction-based business to make data-driven decisions about where to invest their capital to deliver real value to end users.” said Amer Fatayer, Director of Investments at DFDF.
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About Lune
Lune is on a mission to improve the financial lives of everyone. We build innovative technologies and collaborate with companies, financial institutions and fintech to democratize financial data. Lune is the first company that is fully focused on harnessing the power of financial data and is built in the region.
For more information, please visit: www.lunedata.io
