• UAE-based e-commerce AI startup Yozo.ai has raised $1.7 million in pre-seed funding, co-led by Access Bridge Ventures and Disruptech Ventures and joined by Arzan VC, Oraseya Capital, Plus VC, Suhail Ventures, Glint Ventures, and M-Empire Angels.
• Founded in early 2025 by Salma AlBarkouky, Abdallah Moheb El-Din, Taha Salah, Hossam Ali and Zeiad Haridy, Yozo builds an AI-native revenue engine that automates e-commerce growth and retention marketing.
• The funding will support product development and international expansion beyond MENA.

Press release:

Yozo.ai, a UAE-based e-commerce AI startup, has raised $1.7 million in pre-seed funding in a round 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.

Founded in 2025, Yozo.ai is building an AI growth agent that autonomously runs retention and conversion marketing across email, WhatsApp, and SMS for e-commerce merchants. The platform enables merchants to connect their sales channels, approve campaigns, and allow the AI agent to execute, test, and optimise growth workflows without manual intervention.

Yozo is positioning itself as an AI-native revenue engine, targeting a persistent gap in e-commerce between customer intent and completed purchases. By automating tasks traditionally handled by growth and retention teams, the company aims to help merchants capture revenue that is often left unrealised due to fragmented tools, manual execution, or limited internal capacity.

“With Yozo, merchants don’t need a large growth team or complex stacks to run effective lifecycle marketing,” said Hossam Ali, Founder of Yozo. “Conversion and retention involve far more moving parts than most teams can realistically manage. Our agent is designed to handle that complexity autonomously.”

The new capital will be used to further develop the product, strengthen the engineering team, and expand beyond the Middle East into global e-commerce markets, where growth teams are often costly, difficult to hire, or heavily reliant on manual processes.

Commenting on the investment, Issa Aghabi of Access Bridge Ventures said the team’s execution and focus on practical AI adoption stood out, noting that Yozo is well positioned to build a scalable platform embedded directly into everyday e-commerce workflows.

As e-commerce teams increasingly seek efficiency and automation, Yozo aims to become the default AI-driven growth layer for merchants globally.