The startup is targeting a problem many companies feel but rarely insure against, which is cloud outages that shut down operations, stall payments and damage trust within minutes. 

Mantas says downtime is no longer a technical issue. It is a clear financial risk, and it should be treated as one.

The seed round drew backing from Nuwa Capital, Suhail Ventures, Plus VC, OQAL Angel Syndicate and a group of strategic angel investors. 

The funds will be used to build out its product, strengthen risk models and begin early deployments across the Middle East, North Africa and North America.

Cloud infrastructure now underpins everything from payments to flight bookings. When it fails, the impact is swift. But most companies still rely on service-level agreements, legal clauses or internal fixes that do little to cover actual losses. 

That gap is seen in how businesses respond after an outage, confusion first, financial pain later.

Mantas is taking a different route. Its policies are based on parametric insurance. That means payouts are triggered automatically once verified outage conditions are met, without drawn-out claims or negotiations. If the cloud goes down and the agreed threshold is crossed, the payment follows.

“Cloud downtime is now one of the largest unpriced liabilities in the digital economy, as outages at AWS and Azure in late 2025 demonstrated,” said Basil Mimi, CEO and co-founder of Mantas. 

“Businesses have engineered their systems for scale and speed, but the financial layer has not kept up. Parametric insurance allows us to turn cloud outages into a measurable and insurable risk, giving companies certainty at the exact moment they need it most.”

The company focuses on digital-first sectors where constant uptime is necessary. These include fintech, airlines, e-commerce platforms, software providers and regulated enterprises. 

Alongside coverage, Mantas provides real-time monitoring that shows firms how exposed they are and where weaknesses sit, before something breaks.

The idea behind the company came from a moment. Mimi was trying to order food when an outage rippled across systems. What looked minor quickly turned into reputational damage and financial loss for the business involved. 

From his background as a software engineer, what l stood out was that the outage could be measured, but the loss was not insured.

That mismatch is growing. Cloud usage is becoming more concentrated, especially around a few large providers. In North America, outages are increasingly wide-ranging rather than isolated. 

In the Middle East, governments and companies are moving fast into cloud-first setups. In both cases, financial protection has lagged behind dependence.

Investors say this link between real-world infrastructure behaviour and insurance is what sets Mantas apart.

“Downtime is often treated as a technical issue, but for digital businesses it’s increasingly a financial one. Mantas’ approach stood out to us because it ties insurance coverage directly to how infrastructure behaves in the real world, rather than how it’s described on paper. 

“That’s an important step forward for this type of risk.” said Arnav Danthi, principal at Nuwa Capital.

Plus VC also pointed to the team’s execution and focus.

“At Plus VC, we back exceptional founders building category-defining companies, and Mantas is a strong reflection of that conviction. The company is redefining cyber insurance through its technology-driven MGA model, combining tailored coverage with predictive analytics to address one of today’s most critical risks, cloud downtime. 

“What impressed us most is the team’s deep domain expertise, strong execution mindset, and their ability to translate complex risk data into actionable insights that help businesses proactively mitigate exposure. 

“We are excited to support Basil, Abdallah, and the Mantas team as they scale this differentiated platform regionally and beyond,” said Hasan Haider, founder and managing partner at Plus VC.

Ayat Alsabbagh, Principal of Suhail Ventures also said: “We are proud to be partnering with Mantas in leading the shift towards data-driven business protection. 

“The combination of Mantas real-time analytics with parametric insurance will significantly help companies minimise losses from cyber threats and cloud outages in a rapidly growing market. We believe Mantas is setting a new standard for securing enterprise continuity through innovative insurance solutions.”

Mantas plans to expand its insurance coverage as cloud systems become more connected and failures spread faster across services. The goal is to help businesses that lean into complex digital infrastructure, so they are not left exposed when that infrastructure fails.

The funding also saw backing from Y Combinator, Afore Capital, and COTU Ventures, alongside several high-profile angel investors.

Founded by Akeed Azmi and David Reche, both former Careem operators, Cercli was built to solve a long-standing problem in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, fragmented HR systems and outdated compliance processes that fail to connect HR, payroll, and finance. 

The company’s new AI-native architecture aims to unify these operations under one intelligent platform.

In just a year, Cercli has recorded 10x revenue growth, processed over $100 million in payroll across 50 countries, and expanded its customer base to include both startups and large corporations such as Vision Bank, Backlite Media, Global Climate Finance Centre, Huspy, Lean Technologies, and Ziina.

With the new capital, Cercli plans to expand its global footprint, strengthen its engineering team, and roll out new AI-native products designed to automate and simplify HR operations for businesses of all sizes. 

The company is currently hiring top talent from global tech giants such as Google, Meta, and Rippling to ensure its platform remains fast, secure, and reliable.

Azmi explained that Cercli’s focus has always been on rebuilding HR infrastructure from the ground up, not just layering AI onto existing systems. “The legacy systems of the last 20 years, your SAPs, Oracles, Workdays, they were built for on-prem and the cloud. Now we’re entering an AI-native world,” he said. 

“We didn’t want to just integrate AI; we wanted to rethink the whole stack for how people and agents work together.”

That rethink is already boosting Cercli’s services. Its new AI-driven recruitment assistant, Cera, now allows companies to manage hiring from application to onboarding, all within the same system. 

Cercli’s internal operations also rely on AI, with treasury and reconciliation agents managing its finances as the company maintains an average 21% month-on-month revenue growth.

According to Robin Godenrath, founding partner at Picus Capital, Cercli’s integrated approach to workforce management and its early traction made the investment a natural choice. “We’ve seen this business model succeed globally within our portfolio, and we are excited to back Cercli as they continue to grow market share through new customers and product launches,” he said.

Cercli’s Series A round also represents Picus Capital’s first investment in the MENA region, highlighting growing investor trust in the region’s HR-tech potential, an industry projected to exceed $5.8 billion in value.

Cercli is scaling further, and its founders believe that being AI-native gives them a distinct advantage. “Customers are asking for everything in one place, and being AI-native allows us to build that unified experience far more quickly,” Azmi noted.

The startup wants to deliver a single, intelligent platform that manages people, data, and processes seamlessly across borders, and to do so faster than any legacy company ever could.