Dubai, UAE — August 11, 2026: UAE-based customer intelligence startup Cobi 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, Cobi is developing an AI-powered customer intelligence platform designed to help businesses turn fragmented customer data into actionable decisions.
The company said the new funding will be used to accelerate enterprise deployments across the Middle East and international markets, strengthen its customer intelligence, recommendation and decisioning capabilities, and automate workflows connecting customer signals with business decisions.
Turning Customer Data into Decisions
Businesses today collect vast amounts of customer information across product usage, transactions, marketing campaigns, customer feedback and engagement journeys. However, this information is often spread across multiple systems, making it difficult for teams to develop a complete and timely understanding of their customers.
Cobi aims to address this challenge by continuously analysing behavioural, transactional, product and engagement data in real time. Its platform identifies changes in customer preferences, growth, disengagement and journey progression, helping businesses understand which signals matter and when action is required.
The platform also recommends the next best action, product, offer or customer experience and enables businesses to deliver those decisions through their existing workflows and systems.
According to Cobi, its approach is designed to help product marketing, growth and customer experience teams move from manually interpreting customer data to making faster, more informed decisions.
Enterprise Adoption Across the Region
Cobi is already working with enterprises including Mastercard, Emirates Flight Catering, Presight AI, a G42 company, and Lari Exchange to explore applications of customer intelligence in improving customer experiences.
The company also recently announced a five-year agreement with eNovate, a subsidiary of eFinance Investment Group, to integrate Cobi’s intelligence infrastructure across its digital payments ecosystem.
Cobi’s technology is built around a continuous customer decision cycle comprising three stages: Understand, Decide, and Act and Learn.
The platform first connects signals across the customer journey to establish a clearer picture of customer behaviour. It then identifies opportunities, risks and behavioural changes and recommends actions aimed at improving activation, engagement, retention and customer value. The results of those actions are subsequently fed back into the system to improve future recommendations.
Leadership Experience
Cobi’s founding team brings experience across financial services, technology and digital transformation.
CEO and Co-Founder Darren Edmund has more than a decade of experience in data-driven digital transformation, including advising European financial institutions during his time at Deloitte and serving as Chief Business Officer at dropp.
CTO and Co-Founder Botlhale Mosoane has spent a decade building and scaling technology across startups and global enterprises, including experience with Amazon Web Services.
Commenting on the funding, Darren Edmund, Co-Founder and CEO of Cobi, said that customer relationships cannot be fully understood through transactions and predefined scores alone.
“Connecting with customers isn’t binary. The person who spends the most with you isn’t necessarily the person with the strongest loyalty or brand affinity,” said Edmund.
He added that Cobi aims to build an evolving understanding of customers and the touchpoints shaping their experiences, while giving teams direction on how to engage, serve and create value for different customer groups.
Omar Alkhawaja, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Lunara Partners, said enterprises have invested heavily in systems that collect customer data and execute interactions, while the decisions connecting those systems often remain fragmented and manual.
He said Cobi is building an intelligence layer that turns customer signals into measurable action, helping businesses retain customers and translate customer understanding into commercial growth.
With the new capital, Cobi plans to expand its enterprise footprint across the Middle East and international markets while further developing its AI-powered customer intelligence and decisioning capabilities.
