UAE-based customer intelligence startup, Cobi, has raised $1 million in a pre-seed funding round to expand its artificial intelligence-powered platform, which helps businesses turn fragmented customer data into actionable decisions.
The round was led by Lunara Partners, with participation from Plug and Play, Annex Investments and Spring, as the young company targets wider enterprise adoption across the Middle East and international markets.
Founded in 2024 by Darren Edmund and Botlhale Mosoane, Cobi is developing what it describes as an “AI decision stack for customer intelligence,” designed to continuously analyse behavioural, transactional, product and engagement data.
The company said the new funding will support enterprise deployments, strengthen its recommendation and decision-making capabilities, and automate more workflows between raw customer signals and executed business decisions.
What is Cobi and What Does It Do?
Cobi is an artificial intelligence platform designed to help companies understand their customers and determine what action they should take based on changing customer behaviour.
Rather than simply storing or displaying information, the platform analyses different types of customer signals, including purchases, product usage, campaign responses, feedback and customer journeys.
These signals are often stored separately across multiple business systems, making it difficult for companies to develop a complete picture of their customers.
Cobi attempts to solve this problem by continuously interpreting the information and identifying meaningful changes in customer preferences, engagement, growth and potential disengagement.
The company says it can then explain why those changes matter and recommend the “next best action, product, offer or experience,” allowing marketing, growth and customer-experience teams to respond more quickly and effectively.
$1m Funding to Accelerate Enterprise Expansion
The $1 million pre-seed investment represents an important early vote of confidence in Cobi’s technology and business model.
Lunara Partners led the round, while Plug and Play, Annex Investments and Spring also participated. Cobi plans to deploy the new capital primarily toward expanding its enterprise customer base across the Middle East and internationally.
The company will also use the funding to deepen its customer intelligence, recommendation and decisioning capabilities while automating additional workflows between customer data and business actions.
The fundraising comes at a time when businesses are increasingly generating enormous volumes of customer information but often struggle to convert that information into timely decisions.
For Cobi, the opportunity lies in closing that gap and providing companies with an intelligence layer that can translate constantly changing customer signals into measurable commercial action.
Turning Fragmented Customer Data Into Decisions
A major challenge Cobi is targeting is the fragmentation of customer information across modern businesses.
A company’s product usage, transactions, marketing campaigns, customer feedback and journey activity may all be captured by different software platforms, with each system providing only part of the overall picture.
As a result, teams can receive conflicting signals and spend considerable time manually determining what information is important.
Cobi argues that this delay can have a commercial cost because opportunities to intervene may disappear before a decision is made. Its platform continuously analyses these different signals to identify important behavioural changes in real time.
According to the company, this allows businesses to identify opportunities and risks earlier, understand which customers are changing and determine appropriate responses before disengagement or lost revenue becomes more difficult to reverse.
From Customer Understanding to the “Next Best Action”
Cobi’s proposition goes beyond identifying what customers are doing. The company wants its technology to help businesses determine what they should do next. Its platform is built around a continuous cycle of understanding, deciding, acting and learning.
First, Cobi connects information from different points across the customer journey. It then identifies opportunities, risks and behavioural changes and recommends actions that could improve activation, engagement, retention or customer value.
Those decisions can subsequently be delivered through applications and operational systems that companies already use. The outcome is then fed back into the system to improve future recommendations.
CEO and co-founder Darren Edmund explained that “connecting with customers isn’t binary,” arguing that spending alone does not necessarily demonstrate loyalty or brand affinity.
Cobi therefore seeks to develop a more nuanced and evolving understanding of customers and their interactions with a business.
Enterprise Traction and Strategic Partnerships
Beyond its fundraising, Cobi’s growing relationships with major enterprises provide an indication of how it intends to commercialise its technology.
The company said it has been working with organisations including Mastercard, Emirates Flight Catering, Presight AI, a G42 company, and Lari Exchange to explore how customer intelligence can improve customer experiences.
Cobi has also announced a five-year agreement with eNovate, a subsidiary of eFinance Investment Group, to integrate its intelligence infrastructure across the company’s digital payment ecosystem.
Such enterprise relationships could be particularly significant for an early-stage startup because large organisations typically require substantial evidence of reliability, security, scalability and commercial value before integrating new technology into their operations.
Cobi’s ability to secure and develop these relationships will therefore be central to determining whether its customer-intelligence proposition can evolve from an emerging technology into widely adopted enterprise infrastructure.
Experienced Founders and the Road Ahead
Cobi is led by co-founders with backgrounds spanning consulting, digital transformation, technology and global enterprises.
CEO Darren Edmund has spent about a decade working in data-driven digital transformation, including advising European financial institutions at Deloitte and serving as Chief Business Officer at dropp.
CTO Botlhale Mosoane also has approximately a decade of experience building and scaling technology across startups and global enterprises, including Amazon Web Services.
Their combined experience is now being applied to Cobi’s ambition of connecting customer intelligence with business decision-making.
The company’s immediate priority is to expand enterprise deployments, improve its recommendation capabilities and automate more of the journey from customer signals to executed decisions.
Ultimately, Cobi is betting that businesses will need more than systems that collect data or execute customer interactions; they will need intelligent infrastructure capable of connecting the two.
As Lunara Partners’ Omar Alkhawaja put it, Cobi is seeking to build “the intelligence layer that turns customer signals into clear, measurable action.”
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