• UAE-based customer intelligence startup Cobi has raised $1 million in a pre-seed 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 develops an AI-powered customer intelligence platform that analyses behavioural, transactional, product and engagement data to help businesses identify customer changes and recommend actions.
• The funding will be used to expand enterprise deployments across the Middle East and international markets, strengthen Cobi’s customer intelligence and recommendation capabilities, and further automate workflows between customer data and business decisions.

Press release:

Cobi, the AI decision stack for customer intelligence, announces a $1 million pre-seed fund raise.

The raise was led by Lunara Partners – a multi-stage alternative investment firm investing predominantly across the MENA region. Other participating investors included Plug and Play, Annex Investments and Spring.

The proceeds will be used to accelerate enterprise deployments across the Middle East and internationally; deepen Cobi’s customer intelligence, recommendation and decisioning capabilities; and automate more work flows between raw customer signals and executed decisions.

Cobi excels in simplifying customer signals for companies, who face more data and software than ever before. Product behaviour, transactions, campaign performance, customer feedback and journey activity are often captured in fragmented systems, each showing just a part of the customer story. 

Multiple tools yield conflicting signals and teams often end up manually deciding what matters. By the time an answer is reached, the optimum intervention opportunity has passed. Cobi interprets behavioural, transactional, product and engagement signals continuously – in real time – identifying meaningful changes in customer preferences, growth, disengagement and journey progression. 

Cobi explains why the changes matter, recommends the next best action, product, offer or experience, and helps deliver that decision via existing workflows. Product marketing, growth and customer experience teams get to rapidly understand changes among customers, determine the best next actions and deliver those decisions via systems they already use.

Darren Edmund, Co-Founder and CEO of Cobi, said:

“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. Most data platforms and AI systems still flatten that relationship into transactions, scores and predefined signals, even though the nuance between them is fundamental to building real customer connections.

“Our platform builds an evolving understanding of a company’s customers and the touchpoints shaping their experience, then gives teams direction on how to engage, serve and create value for different customer groups.”

Cobi is growing rapidly and has been working with enterprises such as Mastercard, Emirates Flight Catering, Presight AI (a G42 Company) and Lari Exchange, to explore how customer intelligence can help shape better customer experiences. Cobi also recently announced a five-year agreement with eNovate, a subsidiary of eFinance Investment Group, to integrate Cobi’s intelligence infrastructure across its digital payment ecosystem.

Cobi’s Co-founders have considerable blue-chip management experience. CEO Darren Edmund has spent a decade in data-driven digital transformation, including advising European financial institutions while at Deloitte and serving as Chief Business Officer at dropp. CTO Botlhale Mosoane has a decade of experience building and scaling technology across startups and global enterprises, including Amazon Web Services.

Cobi’s platform is built around a continuous customer decision cycle:

Understand: Cobi connects signals from across the customer journey to create a clearer view of what is happening and who is affected.

Decide: Proactively identifies the opportunities, risks and behavioural changes that matter, then recommends actions most likely to improve activation, engagement, retention or customer value.

Act and learn: Decisions can be delivered through the applications, engagement platforms and operational systems a business already uses. The outcome is then used to improve future recommendations.

Omar Alkhawaja, Co-Founder & Managing Partner at Lunara Partners, commented:

“Enterprises have invested heavily in systems that collect customer data and systems that execute interactions, but the decisions connecting them remain fragmented and manual. Cobi is building the intelligence layer that turns customer signals into clear, measurable action, helping companies retain the customers they have worked hard to win and convert customer understanding into commercial growth. Darren and the team have already demonstrated an ability to win complex enterprise customers, 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.”