Cobi Raises $1 Million Led by Lunara Partners

• The UAE-based company Cobi, specializing in customer intelligence solutions, has raised $1 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Lunara Partners, with participation from Plug and Play, Annex Investments, and Spring.
• Founded in 2024 by Darren Edmund and Botlhale Mosoane, the company develops an AI-powered customer intelligence platform that analyzes behavioral data, transactions, product data, and interactions to help businesses monitor changes in customer behavior and recommend appropriate actions.
• Cobi will use the funding to expand its application of solutions among institutions in the Middle East and international markets, enhance its capabilities in customer intelligence, recommendations, and decision-making, as well as increase automation of workflows between customer data and business decisions.

Cobi, which develops an AI-powered platform for decision-making based on customer data and intelligence, announced it has raised $1 million in a pre-seed funding round.

The round was led by Lunara Partners, a multi-stage alternative investment firm primarily focused on the Middle East and North Africa, with participation from Plug and Play, Annex Investments, and Spring.

The company will use the funding to accelerate the deployment of its solutions among institutions in the Middle East and international markets, develop its capabilities in customer intelligence, recommendations, and decision-making, in addition to automating more processes that link primary customer data and signals to the decisions being executed.

Cobi aims to simplify and analyze customer data for businesses dealing with increasing amounts of data and software. Often, product usage data, transactions, marketing campaign performance, customer feedback, and interactions are distributed across separate systems, each providing only a part of the complete picture of the customer.

Different tools may produce conflicting signals, prompting teams to manually identify important data, and in many cases, the optimal intervention opportunity has passed by the time a decision is reached. Cobi continuously and instantaneously analyzes behavioral data, transactions, product data, and interactions to monitor significant changes in customer preferences, growth, declining engagement, and progress through the customer journey stages.

The platform also highlights the importance of these changes, suggesting the most suitable action, product, offer, or experience for the customer, and helping businesses implement the decision through their existing operational systems. This allows product marketing, growth, and customer experience teams to understand changes in customer behavior faster, identify appropriate actions, and execute them across the systems they already use.

Darren Edmund, co-founder and CEO of Cobi, stated:

"Engaging with customers is not a binary matter. The highest-spending customer is not necessarily the most loyal or attached to the brand. Most data platforms and AI systems still reduce this relationship to transactions, scores, and predefined signals, even though the nuances of this relationship are crucial for building genuine connections with customers.

Our platform is designed to build an evolving understanding of a company's customers and the touchpoints that shape their experience, then help teams determine how to interact with different customer groups, serve them, and create value for them."

Cobi collaborates with several institutions, including Mastercard, Emirates Flight Catering, G42's Presight AI, and Lari Exchange, to explore how customer intelligence can enhance customer experiences. The company recently announced a five-year agreement with eNovate, part of eFinance Investment Group, to integrate Cobi's intelligence infrastructure into its digital payments ecosystem.

The founders of Cobi have previous experience in global companies. Darren Edmund has a decade of experience in data-driven digital transformation, including consulting for European financial institutions while at Deloitte, as well as serving as Chief Business Officer at dropp. Botlhale Mosoane, co-founder and CTO, has nearly ten years of experience building and scaling technical solutions in startups and global enterprises, including Amazon Web Services.

Cobi's platform relies on a continuous cycle of customer-related decision-making consisting of three stages: understanding, by linking various signals throughout the customer journey to form a clearer picture of what is happening and the affected customers; decision-making, by identifying opportunities, risks, and significant behavioral changes and suggesting the most likely actions to improve engagement and retention of customers and their value; and then execution and learning, where decisions are implemented through applications, interaction platforms, and existing operational systems, and the results are later used to improve future recommendations.

Omar Alkhawaja, co-founder and managing partner at Lunara Partners, said:

"Institutions have invested heavily in systems that gather customer data and systems that execute interactions with them, but the decisions that link the two remain fragmented and rely on manual work. Cobi builds an intelligence layer that transforms customer signals into clear, actionable, and measurable steps, helping businesses retain customers and turn their understanding into business growth. Darren and his team have proven their ability to attract clients from institutions with complex requirements, and we believe their approach to continuous customer intelligence has the potential to become an important part of how companies understand, serve, and grow with their customers.