Yozo Raises $1.7M Pre-Seed to Build an AI Revenue Engine for E-Commerce
Yozo.ai, a UAE-based startup founded in early 2025, has raised $1.7 million in pre-seed funding to develop an AI-native Revenue Engine designed to automate the work traditionally handled by e-commerce growth and retention teams.
The funding 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.
Yozo aims to tackle one of the most persistent challenges in e-commerce: the gap between shoppers who show intent and those who actually complete a purchase. Today, most e-commerce brands convert less than 3% of their traffic, leaving the vast majority of potential revenue untapped due to the complexity and operational burden of lifecycle and retention marketing.
Founded by second-time entrepreneurs who previously built and exited Fatura, an e-commerce and fintech platform acquired by a leading regional investment bank in 2022, Yozo leverages the team’s firsthand experience with what they describe as “demand leakage” across online retail.
“Conversion and retention marketing involves endless moving parts—data, timing, segmentation, experimentation—far more than most teams can realistically manage,” said Hossam Ali, Founder of Yozo. “As a result, even powerful platforms still depend heavily on human bandwidth, which means much of their potential never gets realized.”
Rather than offering additional tools, Yozo is positioning itself as an autonomous AI operator. The platform functions like a full growth team—combining analytics, copywriting, and experimentation—by automatically designing and launching email, WhatsApp, and SMS campaigns, running multivariate experiments, measuring incrementality, and optimizing performance continuously.
“Generative AI has enabled a completely new category,” Ali added. “We can now encode the judgment, creativity, and experimentation of an entire growth team into a single system that works around the clock.”
Despite launching only three months ago, Yozo is already used by dozens of paying e-commerce brands, ranging from small online stores to fast-growing regional players. In that short period, the platform has helped brands reach more than 250,000 customers through automated flows and targeted campaigns.
“This is a team we’ve worked with closely for four years,” said Mohamed Okasha, Managing Partner at Disruptech Ventures. “They’ve already delivered one of the region’s notable success stories, and now they’re addressing a global e-commerce problem with a product that simply wasn’t possible a few years ago.”
“At Access Bridge Ventures, we focus on the opportunity emerging from application-layer AI across the region,” said Issa Aghabi of Access Bridge Ventures. “Yozo combines strong execution with a practical approach to embedding AI into everyday e-commerce workflows, and we’re pleased to support the team as they scale.”
Looking ahead, Yozo plans to expand aggressively beyond the Middle East, targeting global e-commerce markets where growth teams are often too costly, too manual, or too difficult to hire. The company’s ambition is to become the default revenue engine for digital merchants worldwide.