Journify, a Moroccan and San Francisco-headquartered provider of “ad signal infrastructure”, has raised $12mn in a Series A round at four times its previous valuation, as the company seeks to expand from the Gulf into the world’s largest advertising markets.
The round was led by Al Mada Ventures, the Casablanca-based venture arm of Morocco’s Al Mada holding group, and co-led by returning investor Silicon Badia. Shorooq and Bunat Ventures increased their existing stakes, while Dubai-based Du Ventures and Oraseya Capital joined as new investors. The funding will be used to take Journify into the US and Europe and to expand the artificial intelligence behind its platform.
The deal highlights growing investor appetite for the unglamorous plumbing of digital advertising. As privacy regulation, browser restrictions and Apple’s App Tracking Transparency framework have degraded the third-party cookies and device identifiers that once powered ad targeting, brands are increasingly reliant on their own first-party data. But sending that data to platforms such as Google, Meta and TikTok in a reliable, consented and usable form has become a technical bottleneck for many marketers.
Journify sits between a brand’s internal systems — ecommerce platforms, customer relationship management software, offline sales records and data warehouses — and the major ad platforms. It captures, validates and enriches conversion events, then sends them server-side to Google, Meta, TikTok, Snap and Amazon Ads. In effect, it tries to ensure that the algorithms powering those platforms learn from the purchases and sign-ups that actually happened, rather than from an incomplete or noisy picture.
The timing is driven by the scale of the problem. Global advertising spend is forecast to reach $1.06tn in 2026, according to dentsu, which also expects 75 per cent of that spend to be algorithm-driven by 2028. Those algorithms can only optimise on the signals they receive. Signal loss — the cumulative degradation of user-level tracking data caused by ATT, cookie deprecation and regulation such as GDPR — has made click-based measurement “materially less reliable” than it was five years ago, according to a 2026 analysis by ClickZ. Upper-funnel channels such as TikTok, YouTube and connected TV have been hit hardest because they rely on exposure rather than clicks, but even lower-funnel paid social has seen retargeting pools shrink and attribution become less precise.
Journify’s existing customer base illustrates the commercial case it is making. Jarir Bookstore, one of Saudi Arabia’s largest retailers, increased its return on ad spend on Meta by 182 per cent after using Journify, according to the company, while Saudi ecommerce brand Baytonia grew its TikTok return on ad spend by 80 per cent and cut cost per purchase by 44 per cent. More than 100 businesses now use the platform, ranging from fast-growing ecommerce brands to large regional retailers, representing hundreds of millions of dollars in annual ad spend.
“AI is transforming advertising, but the intelligence behind it is only as good as the signals it receives,” said Taoufik El Jamali, co-founder and chief executive of Journify. “Businesses know who buys, who comes back and what creates lasting customer value. Too little of that knowledge reaches the ad platforms driving their growth.”
The Gulf has been a fertile testing ground. Digital advertising spend across the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council is projected to reach $12.4bn in 2026, growing at 19 per cent year-on-year — more than double the global average — with Saudi Arabia accounting for roughly 48 per cent and the UAE for 35 per cent, according to 23HubLab. Ecommerce in the region has crossed $57bn in gross merchandise value, and more than 82 per cent of transactions are completed on mobile devices. At the same time, tighter consent rules in Saudi Arabia and the UAE are eroding the signal advertisers can collect, making the quality of first-party data a competitive battleground.
Al Mada Ventures’ decision to lead the round is notable. The fund, based in Casablanca, is part of the Al Mada group and has emerged as one of the most active local investors in Moroccan and wider African technology deals. Its managing director, Omar Laalej, framed the investment as a bet on the data layer underpinning AI-driven marketing. “As AI takes on a greater role in marketing, we believe the connection between reliable customer data and the decisions built on it will become increasingly valuable,” he said, describing Journify’s approach as “a privacy-first foundation that can evolve into intelligence and action.”
For Silicon Badia, the round is a follow-on bet. Hossam Shafick, a partner at the firm, said Journify had grown its valuation by more than four times and its revenues by more than five times since Silicon Badia’s initial investment. “That performance has deepened our conviction that Journify can become a global leader in ad signal infrastructure,” he said.
Journify’s ambitions in the US will be tested in the world’s most competitive ad market, where digital advertising revenue reached $294.6bn in 2025, according to IAB and PwC. The company has appointed Ryan Burke, a three-time chief revenue officer, to its board. Burke said he had known El Jamali since their time at InVision, the design software company, and pointed to Journify’s Middle East traction as evidence of product-market fit. “Based on the success they’re already seeing in the Middle East, it’s not a question whether it works in the US, but how fast we can scale,” he said.
The competitive landscape, however, is crowded. Journify is not the only company offering server-side tracking and conversion API integration. Platforms including Elevar, Datahash and various agency-built solutions provide overlapping capabilities, while the ad platforms themselves offer native tools such as Meta’s Conversions API Gateway and Google’s Enhanced Conversions. Journify’s differentiation rests on being platform-agnostic and on the depth of its data-layer integrations, but the moat is not unassailable. The company holds a SOC 2 Type II report and says it is committed to GDPR compliance, credentials that matter for enterprise sales but are increasingly table stakes.
Journify was founded in 2022 by El Jamali, Amine Chouki and Omar Al Shoubaki, and has offices in Dubai and Riyadh alongside its San Francisco headquarters. The company previously raised a strategic round that doubled its valuation as it expanded across the GCC. The new funding will be used to grow its AI capabilities — which already monitor signal quality continuously and power an “AI Insights” product for querying ad performance — as it enters markets where the signal-loss problem is just as acute but the competitive and regulatory environment is more complex.
For now, the company’s pitch is a simple one: in an advertising economy increasingly governed by algorithms, the quality of the data those algorithms consume is the variable that matters most. Whether that pitch translates from the Gulf’s fast-growing, mobile-first market into the US and Europe will determine whether Journify’s fourfold valuation jump is a stepping stone or a peak.