Yozo.ai, a UAE-based startup founded in early 2025, has raised $1.7 million in pre-seed funding to build an AI-native Revenue Engine that automates the work traditionally done by e-commerce growth and retention teams. In just three months since launch, Yozo has already reached more than 250,000 customers for its clients through auto-pilot flows and targeted campaigns.
The round was co-led by Access Bridge Ventures and Disruptech Ventures, with participation from Arzan VC, Oraseya Capital, Plus VC, Suhail Ventures, Glint Ventures, and M-Empire Angels
The founding team includes second-time entrepreneurs who previously built and exited Fatura, an e-commerce and fintech platform acquired by a leading regional investment bank in 2022. Their experience revealed a universal e-commerce issue: the gap between shoppers who show intent and shoppers who actually buy. This “demand leakage” leaves a staggering amount of revenue uncaptured.
Today, most e-commerce brands convert less than 3% of their traffic.That means 97% of shoppers who already know the brand and show intent never complete a purchase. While this represents billions in untapped revenue, the heavy lifting required to run lifecycle and retention marketing keeps most brands from acting on it.
“Conversion and retention marketing involves endless moving parts—data, timing, segmentation, experimentation—far more than most teams can realistically manage,” said founder Hossam Ali. “As a result, even strong platforms like Klaviyo, Mailchimp, and Omnisend depend heavily on human bandwidth, which means much of their real potential never gets realized.”
Instead of giving brands more tools, Yozo is building an autonomous operator.
The system behaves like a full growth team; analyst, copywriter, and experimentation specialist in one. Yozo designs and launches Email/WhatsApp/SMS programs, runs multivariate experiments, measures incrementality, and optimizes results automatically.
“Gen AI has made a completely new category possible,” Ali added. “It lets us encode the judgment, creativity, and experimentation of an entire growth team into a single system that works 24/7. That simply wasn’t achievable before.”
Only three months after launch, the product is already used by tens of paying brands—from small online stores to fast-growing regional players. In that short time, Yozo has reached more than 250,000 customers for its clients through auto-pilot flows and targeted campaigns.
“This is a team we’ve worked with closely for four years. They’ve already delivered one of the region’s notable success stories, and we saw firsthand how they execute,” said Mohamed Okasha, Managing Partner at Disruptech Ventures. “Now they’re tackling a global e-commerce problem with a world-class product that simply wasn’t possible a few years ago.We bet on them once, and we are betting on them again.’’
“At Access Bridge Ventures, we’re focused on the opportunity emerging from application-layer AI across the region,” said Issa Aghabi from Access Bridge Ventures.
“Yozo’s team combines strong execution with a practical approach to embedding AI into everyday eCommerce workflows, and we believe they are well positioned to build a meaningful platform in this space. We’re pleased to support the team as they scale”
Yozo plans to expand aggressively beyond the Middle East, targeting global e-commerce markets where growth teams are either too expensive, too manual, or too difficult to hire. The startup aims to become the “default revenue engine” for digital merchants worldwide.
About Yozo
Yozo (https://yozo.ai) is a UAE-based AI growth agent for e-commerce stores founded in early 2025 by second-time entrepreneurs who previously built and exited Fatura, a B2B e-commerce marketplace for SMEs. Through Yozo, merchants connect their accounts, approve campaigns, and the agent autonomously executes email, WhatsApp, and SMS marketing—from strategy to copy to optimization.
