UAE-based startup Cobi, which specializes in customer intelligence, has raised $1 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Lunara Partners, with participation from Plug and Play, Annex Investments, and Spring. The company plans to use the funding to expand enterprise deployments in the Middle East and international markets, deepen the platform’s customer intelligence, recommendation, and decision-making capabilities, and automate more workflows between customer data and business decisions.
From Scattered Signals to Actionable Decisions
Cobi, founded in 2024 by Darren Edmund and Botlhale Mosoane, is developing an AI-powered platform to analyze behavioral, transactional, product, and engagement data. The platform aims to help companies detect changes among customers and recommend appropriate actions based on those changes.
The company explains that product behavior data, transactions, campaign performance, customer feedback, and activity across the customer journey are often distributed across separate systems, with each system providing only part of the customer picture. The abundance of tools can produce conflicting signals, forcing teams to manually determine what deserves attention, which can delay intervention until the right opportunity has passed.
Cobi continuously interprets these signals in real time, with the goal of identifying important shifts in customer preferences, growth or disengagement, and progress through the journey. The platform also explains why a change matters and recommends the most suitable next action, product, offer, or experience, then helps execute the decision through the workflows and systems the company already uses.
A Continuous Cycle for Understanding the Customer and Making Decisions
The platform relies on an ongoing decision cycle consisting of three main stages:
- Understanding: Connecting signals from different points in the customer journey to build a clearer picture of what is happening and which parties are affected.
- Decision: Proactively identifying important opportunities, risks, and behavioral changes, then recommending actions likely to improve customer activation, engagement, retention, or value.
- Execution and learning: Delivering decisions through existing applications, engagement platforms, and operational systems, then using the results to improve future recommendations.
These capabilities target product marketing, growth, and customer experience teams, which can more quickly understand changes among customer segments, identify next steps, and execute them through the tools they use.
Customers and Agreements Across Multiple Sectors
Cobi works with organizations including Mastercard, Emirates Flight Catering, Presight AI, a G42 company, and Lari Exchange to explore the role of customer intelligence in improving experiences. The company also announced a five-year agreement with eNovate, a subsidiary of eFinance Investment Group, to integrate its intelligence infrastructure into the group’s digital payments ecosystem.
Darren Edmund, co-founder and CEO of Cobi, said that understanding the customer relationship cannot be reduced to a binary equation, explaining that the highest-spending customer is not necessarily the most loyal or connected to the brand. He added that the platform builds an advanced understanding of a company’s customers and the touchpoints that shape their experience, then provides teams with guidance on how to engage with and serve them and create value for different customer groups.
For his part, Omar Alkhawaja, co-founder and managing partner at Lunara Partners, said companies have invested in systems for collecting customer data and others for executing interactions, while the decisions connecting the two remained fragmented and manual. He considered Cobi to be building an intelligence layer that turns customer signals into clear, measurable actions.
The two founders have management and technical experience at major companies and institutions. Edmund spent a decade in data-driven digital transformation, including advising European financial institutions while working at Deloitte, and also served as chief business officer at dropp. Mosoane, the co-founder and chief technology officer, has a decade of experience building and scaling technology at startups and global enterprises, including Amazon Web Services.