Yozo Lands $1.7M to Automate E-commerce Growth with AI “Revenue Engine”

Yozo, a UAE-based startup founded earlier this year, has closed a $1.7 million pre-seed round as it sets out to automate one of e-commerce’s messiest jobs: revenue growth and retention. The company is building what it calls an AI-native “revenue engine”, designed to take over tasks usually handled by full growth and lifecycle marketing teams. And believe it or not, just three months after launch, Yozo says its system has already helped client brands reach more than 250,000 end customers through automated flows and targeted campaigns.

The funding was co-led by Access Bridge Ventures and Disruptech Ventures, with backing from a long list of regional investors including Arzan VC, Oraseya Capital, Plus VC, Suhail Ventures, Glint Ventures, and M-Empire Angels. It’s a crowded cap table, but that tends to happen when familiar founders come back with another swing. The team behind Yozo previously built Fatura, an e-commerce and fintech platform acquired by a major regional investment bank in 2022.

That earlier journey seems to have left a mark. The founders talk about a problem they kept running into: shoppers showing clear intent, then quietly disappearing before checkout. Most online stores convert less than 3% of their traffic, meaning almost everyone who visits never buys. On the flip side, fixing that “demand leakage” is a bit of a faff. You need data, segmentation, timing, constant testing… and a team big enough to juggle it all.

“Conversion and retention marketing involves endless moving parts—data, timing, segmentation, experimentation—far more than most teams can realistically manage,” founder Hossam Ali said, pointing out that even widely used tools like Klaviyo or Mailchimp still rely heavily on human effort to unlock their full value.

Instead of adding yet another dashboard to the mix, Yozo is aiming higher. Its platform acts as a kind of autonomous operator, combining the roles of analyst, copywriter and experimentation specialist. It designs and launches email, WhatsApp and SMS campaigns, runs multivariate tests, measures what’s actually incremental, then adjusts automatically. Ali argues that recent advances in generative AI finally make this possible, encoding judgement and creativity into software that works round the clock.

I reckon this is where the conversation gets interesting. Around Arageek, we’ve seen countless founders across the region struggle to hire or afford solid growth teams, especially as they scale. An AI system that does “good enough” work consistently, without burning out, is something many founders would be chuffed to bits to try, even if they keep a human in the loop.

Investors seem to agree. Mohamed Okasha, Managing Partner at Disruptech Ventures, said his firm had worked closely with the founders for years and backed them once before. Now, he noted, they’re tackling a global e-commerce challenge with a product that simply wasn’t possible a few years ago. Issa Aghabi from Access Bridge Ventures also highlighted the opportunity in application-layer AI, saying Yozo’s approach fits neatly into everyday eCommerce workflows.

Today, the product is already being used by tens of paying brands, from small online shops to fast-growing regional players. Next up is expansion beyond the Middle East, targeting markets where growth teams are either too expensive, too manual, or just too hard to hire. The ambition is bold: to become the default revenue engine for digital merchants worldwide. It’s early days, yes, but this definately feels like a space worth watching, you know?

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