Inc. Arabia’s Post

UAE-based Amaani, the parent company behind the beauty brand AÏZA by Amaani, has raised US$5 million in a Series A funding round that will support its expansion into Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar. UAE-based BECO Capital led the round, with participation from UAE-based Homegrown Ventures and Surge, the seed investment platform of India-based Peak XV Partners. This raise brings the total funding Amaani has raised since inception to $8 million. Founded in 2023 by Shubham Poddar, Amaani launched AÏZA in December 2024 as a skincare and haircare brand built around Arab heritage ingredients like dates, frankincense, black seed, and bakhoor, formulated in labs across South Korea, Japan, and Italy. In an interview with Inc. Arabia, Poddar, founder and CEO of Amaani, said that the idea for AÏZA emerged from his experience working in the region’s investment ecosystem, where he saw an opportunity to build a beauty brand from the Middle East for a global audience. “The Middle East is one of the world's most sophisticated consumers of global beauty,” Poddar noted. “People here spend more on beauty per capita than almost anywhere else. And yet, very few globally ambitious beauty brands had been built from this culture, and taken to the world. Not an adaptation of something Western. Not a cheaper alternative. Something original, rooted in the ingredients and rituals that have existed here for centuries.” It is this balance between regional authenticity and global ambition that Poddar sees as central to AÏZA’s proposition. “What makes AÏZA different is that we combine something most global brands can never replicate—a deep understanding of this consumer, this culture, and what she actually needs—with the team, the standards, and the ambition to build it at the level of the world's best beauty brands,” he explained. “We're not building a regional brand. We're building a global brand that starts here.” More insights from Poddar in our full article--check it out using the link in this post's comments!