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Investors back Journify’s push into the US and Europe

Journify, the ad signal infrastructure company, today announced a $12 million Series A at four times its previous valuation. Al Mada Ventures led the round, co-led by returning investor Silicon Badia, with Shorooq and Bunat Ventures increasing their investment and Du Ventures and Oraseya Capital joining as new investors. The funding will take Journify into the US and Europe and expand the AI behind its platform.

Global ad spend will exceed $1 trillion in 2026, with algorithms expected to place three quarters by 2028, according to dentsu. These systems learn from the customer outcomes brands send back. Browser restrictions, broken tracking, and disconnected offline sales leave them with an incomplete picture of who buys.

Journify makes sure ad platforms such as Google, Meta, TikTok, Snap and Amazon Ads see the purchases, sign-ups and store sales a brand’s customers actually make. More than 100 businesses use Journify today, from fast-growing ecommerce brands to some of the region’s largest retailers, representing hundreds of millions of dollars in annual ad spend.

Customers include Jarir Bookstore, one of Saudi Arabia’s largest retailers, which increased its return on ad spend on Meta by 182%, and Saudi ecommerce brand Baytonia, which grew its return on ad spend on TikTok by 80% while cutting cost per purchase by 44%.

“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 CEO 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. Our vision is to close that gap, turning real customer outcomes into intelligence ad platforms can learn from. We’re building toward a future where advertising AI understands what makes a customer valuable to each business, not just what makes them click.”“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,” said Omar Laalej, Managing Director at Al Mada Ventures. “What interests us about Journify is its approach to building that connection from the data layer up: a privacy-first foundation that can evolve into intelligence and action. The founders’ understanding of that opportunity gives us confidence in their ability to build a platform that marketers can increasingly rely on, both to understand their customers and to act on that understanding.”Hossam Shafick, Partner at Silicon Badia, Seed Lead and returning investor, added, “Since our initial investment, Journify has grown its valuation by more than 4x, and its revenues more than 5x, validating both the strength of its technology and the team’s ability to execute at scale. That performance has deepened our conviction that Journify can become a global leader in ad signal infrastructure. We are proud to double down and co-lead this round as the company expands into the world’s largest advertising markets.”

Journify already uses AI to monitor every connection continuously, detect signal-quality issues and fix them. The new funding will grow those capabilities as Journify expands beyond the GCC. In the US alone, digital advertising revenue reached $294.6 billion in 2025, according to IAB and PwC.

“I’m excited to help Journify scale in the biggest ad market in the world,” said Ryan Burke, a newly appointed member of Journify’s board and three-time Chief Revenue Officer. “I’ve known Taoufik since our InVision days, and I’ve seen his product execution in action. 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.”

About Journify

Journify builds ad signal infrastructure for performance marketers. Its privacy-first, real-time data layer helps brands improve the quality and reliability of the first-party signals used in advertising and measurement.

Journify connects data across web, mobile, offline sales, CRM, ecommerce platforms, backend systems and data warehouses. It validates and enriches conversion events and activates consented signals server-side across Google, Meta, TikTok, Snap, Amazon Ads and other platforms.

Founded in 2022 by Taoufik El Jamali, Amine Chouki and Omar Al Shoubaki, Journify is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Dubai and Riyadh. Learn more at journify.io.

Journify has obtained a SOC 2 Type II report and is committed to GDPR compliance.

Contact

Head of Marketing

Vanessa Moreno

Journify

[email protected]

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While delivering record Q4 revenue, Apple’s financial results revealed a $33 billion cost associated with memory price inflation, representing the true cost of the growing bubble of AI data center investments. 

The results also showed something that threatens those same data center investments — a sea change in how enterprises are approaching AI. Inference costs, security, and data governance concerns may finally be dampening enthusiasm for cloud-based AI services.

Enterprises go local

Apple revealed several major enterprise clients who are turning to its products as solutions for local inference. The company told us that Gap Inc. is running AI loss-prevention models entirely on Mac minis to eliminate cloud token costs, while world-famous auction house Christie’s is using Mac Studio to run local pricing estimate models.

Apple’s wider enterprise wins matter too. It told analysts and investors that as well as purchasing 25,000 iPads for pilots and mechanics, American Airlines is deploying over 37,000 iPhone 17 devices to flight attendants for in-flight purchases with Tap-to-Pay. In education, it revealed a huge deal with the Department of Education in the Philippines, which will deploy 170,000 MacBook Neos to teachers and staff.

All these deployments help the company build up its mindshare, which should translate into future customer success and help it stay relevant in fast-changing times. But it’s really Apple’s pivot into AI that is tempting business users to make these purchases. 

The hardware and the economics

It’s not trivial that the company’s M-series and A-series processors are highly performant. It matters that you can patch together four Macs to create a powerful on-premises AI system more than capable of handling even highly complex AI calculations. 

“From Mac to iPhone to iPad, we are proud that our products are the best platforms in the industry for AI for both first-party and third-party applications, and we’re excited about the opportunities that creates,” CEO John Ternus said.

Look at it this way: If a Mac costs a few thousand bucks but can deliver the equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars of inferencing tokens during its lifespan, then it’s a bargain, not a cost. What Apple confirmed is that at least some enterprise purchasers are paying attention to this.

Monetizing both ends

Of course, the other side to AI is the need to build it, so it also matters that when it comes to the deployment of its AI APIs from within applications created by third-party developers, Apple is providing a lot more clarity. It is giving developers building apps with under two million downloads direct access to its powerful server-side LLMs completely free of token costs, it said.

It has also introduced a three-tiered system for developers needing to use its Private Cloud Compute infrastructure. The company is also putting a little more flesh on its plans to charge end user customers for heavy access to its server-side queries through iCloud+. 

What that means is that while delivering hardware capable of running on-device AI, Apple is also building an end user market for AI inferencing the Apple way, and equipping developers with the tools they need to attract end users to make use of its inferencing capacity in the first place. It is monetizing both ends of the story, while also enabling all parties to build success.

That’s not just about building and maintaining AI relevance for Apple. It’s also about building up new business opportunity. Ternus pretty much confirmed this, telling analysts during the Q4 financial call, “in the beginning, iCloud tiers were largely about storage, but we’ve been adding more capabilities and features to it.”

Siri agentic AI

Ternus also talked up Siri AI. “With Siri AI, we really have the kind of the Siri that we always wanted,” he said. “It’s primarily request-based today, but as we talked about at WWDC, it’s built on a modern orchestrator-driven architecture that gives us real room to expand its capabilities over time. As far as agentic capabilities, we think these are promising tools for users. We just want to make sure that users are aware of what they’re giving access to.”

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In 2023, malware tracked as BlackLotus became the first publicly documented in-the-wild UEFI bootkit capable of bypassing Secure Boot on fully updated Windows 11 systems. With the industry-wide chain-of-trust mechanism subverted, the malware was able to run malicious code before Windows was fully loaded and many security defenses were operational.

Microsoft had already patched the vulnerability that BlackLotus exploited in 2022. In 2023 and 2024, Microsoft issued additional updates. The first added a new certificate that no longer trusted the vulnerable boot managers. The second provided the means to revoke trust in the digital certificate used to sign older vulnerable Windows boot managers. The organizations infected by the new bootkit, which is tracked under the name BlackX, had installed all of these patches. So how did they fall victim?

UEFI bootkit refresher

Before discussing the incident further, a brief review of BlackLotus and UEFI malware is in order. Short for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, UEFI is firmware that runs immediately after a computer is turned on. One of its main jobs is to load system configuration settings, identify and initialize hardware components, and prepare the computer to start its OS.

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