Valu has become Noon Minutes’ exclusive payments partner in Egypt

Valu is taking its financing products into Noon Minutes’ quick-commerce checkout, becoming the platform’s exclusive financial payments provider and first payment partner in Egypt, the company said on LinkedIn. Customers can use Valu payment plans of up to 60 months, while the firm’s buy-now-pay-later platform Spark It lets them defer purchases for up to 45 days with no additional fees.

The tie-up pushes Valu further into everyday spending. Noon Minutes — a quick-commerce delivery service by Emirati e-commerce platform Noon — covers groceries, household essentials, personal care, and other routine purchases — the kind of higher-frequency transactions Valu has been targeting as it moves beyond big-ticket financing. Transaction volumes rose 49% y-o-y to 2.53 mn in 1Q 2026, with management looking to increase how often customers use the platform over the course of the year.

REMEMBER- The two companies first partnered in 2022 to bring installment financing to Noon’s marketplace, before expanding the tie-up into Noon Payments in 2024.

Plug and Play joins DarE

Dar Ventures partners with Plug and Play on DarE: Dar Ventures, the venture capital arm of engineering and design firm Dar, has partnered with accelerator and early-stage investor Plug and Play for the next phase of DarE, the startup program it set up, according to a statement (pdf). DarE backs tech for architecture, engineering, construction, and the wider built environment, and has supported 32 startups over four cohorts so far. The statement did not disclose the partnership's financial terms.

Who can apply: The 12-week program, run partly online and partly in person, is open to pre-seed to pre-Series A startups that have a working minimum viable product or a market-ready one, along with some early market validation. It will recruit mainly from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, but is open to founders elsewhere. Applications opened on 24 September, and the program starts in November.

What Plug and Play brings: The company says it has more than 60 offices, works with over 550 corporate and government partners, and has accelerated more than 10k startups since 2012. DarE’s participants will get access to that network alongside Dar's industry expertise.

It’s not new to Egypt: Plug and Play launched a Smart Cities hub here with the National Bank of Egypt, ITIDA, and USAID to connect early- and growth-stage startups with mentors and industry and to source investments for its venture arm, Karima El Hakim, then country director and now Partner, Africa, told us in 2022. The firm also invests directly in early-stage startups and offers corporate innovation services to corporations and startups.

A Saudi shareholder for GlobalPay

Saudi tech executive Abdulaziz Al Salloum has bought a 10% stake in UAE-based GlobalPay, according to a company statement (pdf). The transaction was signed in Cairo, but GlobalPay did not disclose the price, the seller, its valuation, or whether Al Salloum bought new shares or existing ones. GlobalPay's Egyptian business is MasrPay, which builds payment tools for merchants and businesses.