Ricoh announced the establishment of its new Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) fund, the RICOH Innovation Fund Ⅱ. Aiming to create new businesses, Ricoh will strengthen strategic investments in overseas startups through this Fund to help enhance the value of customers’ workplaces.

In November 2023, Ricoh established its first CVC fund, the RICOH Innovation Fund Ⅰ. To accelerate its transformation into a digital services company, Ricoh has advanced business development through partnerships and collaborations with external companies, particularly in areas where markets and technologies are rapidly evolving. As a result, Ricoh has invested in nine overseas startups to date, supporting their growth while delivering new value to customers.

Under the new fund, Ricoh will further expand its investments in overseas startups, in line with its current mid-term strategy, starting in fiscal 2026. Building on the investment and collaboration process established through the first fund, Ricoh will further strengthen collaboration between the invested startups and Ricoh’s overseas operations, accelerating the creation of new business opportunities and global growth.

Sanae Endo, Corporate Officer, Ricoh Company, Ltd., stated, “Building on the insights and achievements gained through our first fund, we have established the RICOH Innovation Fund II to seize new opportunities from a greater global perspective. By expanding our investments in overseas startups and accelerating collaboration across our local operations, we are committed to advancing the value of the workplace.”

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Lucky, a leading financial technology company in Egypt and the Middle East, today announced the successful closing of a $23 million Series B funding round, including a mix of equity and debt. The round was led by existing & new investors, including Disruptech Ventures, DPI Venture Capital via Nclude fund and new strategic participation from Suez Canal Bank and OneStop, chaired by the visionary Tech Investor Mohamed Farouk, who has also been appointed as the Chairman of the Board for Lucky App.

This milestone follows a period of significant-growth for the company. After achieving 3x annual growth in 2025 and marking profitability by the end of 2025, Lucky has solidified its position as a leader in consumer credit, aiming to play a significant role in Egypt’s transformation into a digital & financially inclusive economy inline with the Central Bank of Egypt’s vision.

The new capital will support Lucky’s next phase of growth, with a focus on scaling its credit offering, expanding into North Africa, and strengthening its infrastructure, licensing, and regulatory readiness as it moves toward becoming a neo-banking-ready platform.

Mohamed Farouk, who now chairs Lucky’s Board, emphasized the company’s strong growth and vision: “Lucky has demonstrated disciplined growth, strong product-market fit, and a clear vision for inclusive digital finance,” said Farouk. “This investment supports a platform that is well-positioned to be one of the leading players in the next phase of consumer credit and neo-banking in the region.”

“With Mohamed Farouk’s vision, Lucky is well positioned to advance inclusive digital finance,” commented Ayman Essawy, CEO of Lucky. “Financial access is the foundation of progress. This round allows us to scale responsibly, invest in infrastructure, and deepen our impact as regulators unlock digital onboarding and modern payment frameworks across Egypt and the region. Lucky removes complexity from credit and opens it up to more people, leveraging its advanced technology and AI capabilities. With a card that works anywhere and anytime, we help individuals move forward confidently.”

The investment also aligns with broader regulatory tailwinds shaping Egypt’s fintech landscape. Recent advances in digital onboarding, payments infrastructure, and the introduction of PSP licensing mark a turning point for fintech players with proven scale and compliance capabilities. Lucky has already begun work toward PSP licensing, positioning the company to expand its service stack and support more comprehensive digital financial services over time.

Since launch, Lucky has built partnerships across merchants and financial institutions, serving a rapidly growing user base across Egypt. The company plans to leverage this round to enter select North African markets while continuing to enhance its technology, risk infrastructure, and regulatory capabilities.

 

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Collide Capital, founded by Brian Hollins and Aaron Samuels, announced the close of a $95 million Fund II.

Rebellions, an AI inference infrastructure company, has raised $400 million in a pre-IPO funding round led by Mirae Asset Financial Group and the Korea National Growth Fund. The round follows the company’s $250 million Series C in September 2025, bringing total funding to $850 million and valuing the company at approximately $2.34 billion.

With $650 million raised in the past six months – over 75% of its total capital to date – Rebellions is entering a new phase of growth focused on U.S. market expansion, scaled production of its Rebel100 platform, and preparation for a future IPO.

The announcement comes at a defining moment for AI infrastructure. As AI adoption accelerates, the limiting factors are no longer model capability alone, but the ability to run those models efficiently, economically, and at scale in data center environments.

“AI is now measured by its ability to operate in the real world – at scale, under power constraints, and with clear economic return,” says Sunghyun Park, Co-Founder and CEO of Rebellions. “That shifts the center of gravity toward inference infrastructure and software that makes that infrastructure usable. The companies that succeed in this era will not be defined by silicon alone, but by how effectively they integrate into the open source software ecosystem and enable developers to build and deploy without friction.”

This perspective reflects a broader industry reality that infrastructure must support production workloads immediately, within existing data center constraints, while delivering sustainable performance over time.

Rebellions is expanding its global footprint with a focused push into the United States, where demand for efficient, deployable AI infrastructure is accelerating across cloud providers, Neoclouds, telecom operators, and government-backed initiatives. The expansion is led by Chief Business Officer Marshall Choy, who recently joined the company to drive global growth.

“The U.S. market is reaching a point where access to compute is no longer the only question – how efficiently that compute is used is becoming just as important,” says Choy. “Organizations are looking for infrastructure that works within their existing environments, extends the life of their current investments, and enables new revenue-generating AI applications. That is where we are focused today.”

At the core of this strategy is Rebellions’ software-centric approach. The company has built a cloud-native AI stack and serving platform for production-scale deployment, underpinned by Kubernetes and designed to work natively with leading open source software, including vLLM, PyTorch, Triton, Hugging Face, and OpenShift. The platform delivers high-performance distributed inference, broad model support, and a consistent deployment experience.

This architecture reflects a clear belief that AI infrastructure will be defined by open ecosystems that abstract hardware complexity. By aligning with open source standards from the outset, Rebellions enables developers to deploy across diverse models and environments without proprietary lock-in. Combined with a mature, end user tested and validated software stack, this positions the company to support heterogeneous AI infrastructure at scale.

Additionally, Rebellions RebelRack and RebelPOD – both available today – extend the platform beyond silicon and software into fully deployable, vertically integrated AI infrastructure platforms. The RebelRack delivers a production-ready unit of inference compute, while the RebelPOD integrates multiple racks into a scalable cluster designed for large-scale AI deployment.

Together, these solutions represent a shift toward delivering complete, modular AI infrastructure that can be deployed, replicated, and scaled across data center environments. Built on the chiplet-based Rebel100 NPU, the platform is optimized at the system level for performance-per-watt and cost efficiency, enabling organizations to operate AI workloads within real-world power and infrastructure constraints.

The round is led by Mirae Asset Financial Group, whose leadership includes early investors in SpaceX, bringing a track record of identifying companies that redefine foundational industries.

“Amid the global race for AI leadership, venture capital plays a critical role in identifying and backing high-potential companies. Mirae Asset has supported Rebellions since its Series A, driven by strong conviction in its potential,” said Eung-Suk Kim, Vice Chairman and CEO of Mirae Asset Venture Investment.  “We are proud to support Rebellions— the first company backed by the Korean National Growth Fund—as a strategic partner in demonstrating its capabilities and value on the global stage.”

The Korea National Growth Fund, a public-private program established to support strategic industries – particularly AI and semiconductors – also participated in the round, choosing Rebellions as its first investment as part of the K-Nvidia initiative. This milestone highlights the strategic importance of Rebellions within Korea’s broader ambition to build globally competitive AI leaders.

With strong capital backing, expanding global operations, and availability of its next-generation Rebel platform, Rebellions is advancing toward a future public offering.

“Our objective is to build a durable infrastructure company that enables the next phase of AI adoption,” concludes Sunghyun Park. “That requires long-term investment in software, systems, and ecosystem – in addition to hardware – and a clear focus on making AI deployable at scale.”

 

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Presight has unveiled the first six AI companies selected to receive investment through its AI Innovation Ecosystem, strengthening the pipeline of technologies designed to power next-generation intelligent systems at national and enterprise scale. 

The investments form part of the Presight–Shorooq Fund I (PSFI), a US$100 million global early-stage fund established in partnership with Shorooq.

The six companies to receive investment are located across the United States and UAE, and span sovereign AI infrastructure, vertical intelligence platforms for capital and industry, and edge-native intelligence systems. Together, these startups reflect Presight’s focus on identifying breakthrough applied intelligence systems primed for integration into complex, regulated environments where reliability, resilience, and governance are critical. 

World Model Architecture 

• AMI-Advanced Machine Intelligence advances world model AI architectures designed to help machines understand and interact with the physical world, enabling deeper reasoning, planning, and real-world interaction beyond traditional predictive AI architectures. Founded by Turing Award winner and former Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun, AMI is developing a new class of AI systems that learn from spatial and real-world data to model cause and effect. Headquartered in Paris with offices in New York, Montreal, and Singapore, the company is initially targeting enterprise applications across manufacturing, aerospace, robotics, and biomedical industries. 

Sovereign AI Infrastructure 

• NodeShift gives enterprises a secure, on-premises AI platform that enables users to use and deploy AI models while keeping all data within their own infrastructure. A participant in Cohort I of Presight’s AI Accelerator Program,  NodeShift has now entered into a strategic commercial agreement with Presight to scale its solutions and pursue joint go-to-market initiatives, reflecting the continued collaboration between Presight and startups participating in the program.  

Vertical Intelligence for Capital and Industry 

• Hebbia enhances institutional research and financial workflows in regulated capital markets. 
  
• Candid Intelligence applies AI to optimize procurement and bidding processes across infrastructure and public-sector environments. 
  
• Crunched turns complex company/market data into faster modeling, deeper insights, and decision-grade analysis for investors and operators, using its advanced AI financial intelligence platform 

Secure, Edge-Native Systems 

• Blue utilizes a voice-action model layer powering voice agents that can complete multi-step tasks directly on phones, avoiding APIs and integration overheads. 

A Structured Pathway from Innovation to Intelligent Systems 
Presight’s AI Innovation Ecosystem is the company’s growth engine, designed to identify, acquire, invest, accelerate and incubate the next generation of breakthrough AI intellectual property to ensure that emerging technologies are developed with deployment in mind from day one. Presight’s AI Innovation Ecosystem consists of an AI Investment Fund, an AI Accelerator Program, and Research and Development Labs. 

Through the Presight AI Accelerator Program, companies receive structured mentorship, access to world-leading compute infrastructure, fast-track commercialization pathways with enterprise and government clients within the G42 and Presight ecosystems, and technical integration support. This model ensures alignment with real operational and commercial requirements — enabling integration, contracts, and the development of defensible moats. 

Strategic capital vehicles such as PSFI strengthen this pathway by providing early-stage funding aligned to the same thesis, enabling companies to scale within sovereign and regulated environments. 

Together, incubation, capital, and deployment create a coordinated model for translating AI innovation into intelligent systems that deliver real-world impact. 

Magzhan Kenesbai, Chief Growth Officer of Presight, commented: “AI only creates lasting value when it can operate within real systems. These first investments reflect that conviction – spanning secure AI infrastructure, vertical intelligence platforms for capital and industry, and edge-native systems. Each of these companies is building technology designed for integration into complex, regulated environments. By combining operational environments, structured incubation through the Presight AI Accelerator, and strategic capital via PSFI, we are creating clear pathways from innovation to implementation – translating frontier AI into intelligent systems at scale.”  

Dr. Bilal Baloch, Partner at Shorooq, said: “When we launched this fund, our vision was to connect world-class AI innovators with the capital, regulatory support, and market access that our region offers. To have invested in six highly promising companies, after assessing over 1,000, outside our home market alongside leading peers in the US and Asia in 120 days is a marker toward that vision. We were most impressed that these founders are pushing the boundaries of what AI can do – from giving every app a voice interface to automating billion-dollar industries – and thereby allowing us to back varying theses across the AI stack. This is just the beginning; we believe the fund can be a bridge between East and West for AI, and we’re committed to accelerating more breakthroughs that will transform businesses and communities.” 

 

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Nahda Capital Partners, a newly established private equity platform headquartered in Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), has filed for the registration of its inaugural private equity fund this week as it prepares to launch investment activities across the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).

“Nahda” in Arabic refers to a renaissance — a renewal and resurgence. The firm chose the name to reflect its long-term mission of building enduring partnerships and contributing to the development of the region’s real economy, with a particular focus on supporting local founders, families and institutions.

Nahda Capital Partners is led by Iñigo de Luna, Founder and Managing Partner, and is building a control-oriented mid-market private equity strategy focused primarily on the UAE, Saudi Arabia and wider GCC. The firm will target resilient founder-led and family-owned businesses benefiting from structural regional growth and increasing institutionalisation, particularly companies undergoing generational transition or seeking institutional capital and operational support to accelerate their next phase of expansion across the GCC.

The founding partners bring significant international experience across private equity and investment banking, with a historical track record generating approximately 36% gross IRR across multiple economic cycles.

Key highlights of the strategy include a majority-investment approach in partnership with founders and family shareholders, and an operational value-creation model focused on professionalisation, operational improvement, governance strengthening, and selective buy-and-build expansion.

Nahda expects to focus on sectors including food production and distribution, healthcare, education, and industrial technology. The firm’s investment approach is guided by principles aligned with Sharia-compliant investing, including a focus on real-economy assets, prudent use of leverage, and disciplined governance.

“Nahda Capital Partners was established to partner with high-quality mid-market businesses across the GCC that can benefit from long-term capital and hands-on operational support,” said Iñigo de Luna. “These are difficult days and the priority is safety and de-escalation. At the same time, we view this as a severe but temporary shock rather than a change in the long-term trajectory of the UAE and the region. Our conviction has not changed: the GCC is structurally strengthening as a place to build businesses and allocate long-term capital.”

Subject to regulatory approval, the firm expects to commence fundraising in the coming weeks, targeting approximately $300 million for its inaugural fund to be managed from ADGM.

 

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