As demand for personalized consumer experiences grows, the startup is building infrastructure to control quality and expand regionally

A simple consumer frustration is turning into a scalable FoodTech play across MENA.

Why You Should Care

Lola is not just digitizing cake ordering. It is building infrastructure around personalization, one of the strongest consumer shifts in the region.

For founders and investors, the signal is clear: even highly fragmented, offline-first categories like bakeries can be reorganized through product experience and operational control. The opportunity is not just in aggregation, but in owning the full customer journey.

Lola, a cake ordering and customization platform, has raised USD 3 million in a seed funding round. The round was led by Vision Ventures, with participation from Aljazira Capital, Seedra Ventures, Plus VC, and other investors.

Founded in 2023 by Othman Janahi, Lola is a foodtech platform focusing on cake ordering and customisation. It focuses on simplifying a process that has traditionally been manual and inconsistent. Instead of back-and-forth communication with bakeries, users can design and visualize their cakes directly on the platform before ordering.

“What we’re building at Lola goes far beyond cakes , it’s a new way to create and experience celebrations. This funding allows us to scale that vision, strengthen our infrastructure, and maintain full control over the customer experience,”

Othman Janahi, Founder of Lola

The company initially scaled through partnerships with local bakeries across Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Kuwait, allowing it to expand quickly as demand grew.

With the new funding, Lola is shifting its model. The company plans to build a central production facility in Dammam, aiming to support consistency, control, and scalability. This will be in tandem with a network of cloud bakeries to improve consistency while maintaining scalability across markets.

The Ripple

Lola’s move toward centralized production signals a shift in how consumer platforms in MENA scale.

Early-stage startups often rely on aggregation to grow quickly. The next phase is control, owning supply, quality, and delivery experience. That transition is becoming more common across sectors, from food delivery to e-commerce.

For traditional bakeries, this introduces a new competitive dynamic. Platforms are no longer just intermediaries. They are becoming operators.

What to Watch

The next phase for Lola is execution, not demand.

Building a centralized production facility while maintaining a distributed network of cloud bakeries introduces operational complexity. Consistency, delivery speed, and cost control will determine whether the model scales efficiently across multiple markets.

At the same time, the company’s move into a broader “celebration platform” will test whether this is a high-frequency category or remains occasion-driven. That distinction will shape how large this business can ultimately become.

If the model works, it creates a playbook that could extend beyond bakeries into other offline-first consumer verticals across MENA.