KSA-Based Foodics Completes Acquisition of Greece’s Norma AI

Saudi Arabia-based restaurant and payment tech company Foodics has acquired Norma AI, a Greece-based artificial intelligence (AI) company focused on the hospitality and restaurant industry. 

Founded in 2014 by Ahmad Al-Zaini and Mosab Al-Othmani in Saudi Arabia, Foodics began as a cloud-based restaurant management and point-of-sale (POS) platform designed to help food and beverage (F&B) businesses in the MENA region digitize their operations. Since then, the company has evolved into an end-to-end technology ecosystem that brings together front-of-house ordering, kitchen operations, inventory management, digital payments, and financial tools within a single platform. Today, Foodics serves more than 40,000 restaurants across over 400 cities worldwide. 

Meanwhile, Norma AI, which was founded in Greece in 2022 by George Henein and Anastasios Anastasiadis, develops data analytics tools designed to help hospitality operators access and interpret business data without requiring technical expertise. In 2024, the company launched a natural language querying business intelligence application that enables users to ask questions in plain language, receive instant answers, and create custom dashboards.  

Foodics had previously secured an initial partial stake in Norma AI in the first quarter of 2025, leading to the successful integration of the latter's technology into the former's platform, where it has since been adopted by more than 10,000 customer branches. With the acquisition now complete, Norma AI's team will join Foodics' dedicated AI division focused on building the next generation of agentic AI for restaurant operations.   

In an interview with Inc. Arabia, Al-Zaini, co-founder and CEO of Foodics, said that mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are an essential part of its growth strategy. “Foodics' decision to acquire Norma AI was driven by the strategic imperative to enhance its ecosystem with specialized, ready-to-deploy, AI-powered data analytics capabilities,” he said. “Acquiring Norma AI allowed us to rapidly gain mature technology and expertise that would have been time-consuming to develop organically. This acquisition expedites our product roadmap and our clients' adoption of the latest AI tech that directly impacts their businesses. In our industry, time is money, and time wasted means money wasted for our clients. Conversational AI, easy-to-understand data analytics, and another brain that helps you make the right decisions fast—that’s what operators need, and that’s what we are aiming to deliver with Norma AI’s tech and team now on board." 

It’s worth noting here that Foodics' acquisition of Norma AI runs counter to the more familiar pattern of Western companies acquiring GCC startups. When asked what the transaction signals about the broader evolution of the GCC’s entrepreneurial landscape, Al-Zaini replied, “Honestly, the acquisition wasn't a statement about the region's startup ecosystem; it was the right product decision. But I understand why it reads as a signal, because it is one. GCC startups used to exit to Western acquirers. Now we're the ones with the balance sheet, the growing markets, the distribution, and the vision to integrate. Founders in our region always had the ambition; what's changed is access to capital, the maturity of our product roadmaps, and critically, the talent to execute on them. We now have a generation of operators and builders who've gone through the full cycle, zero to one, one to scale, and beyond. That experience compounds. It raises the bar for every team that comes after. What that tells me is that the ecosystem has reached a new level of maturity. We're no longer dependent on outside validation or external exits to sustain momentum. The capital, the talent, the market understanding—it’s here. The GCC ecosystem is becoming self-reliant, and acquisitions like this one are proof of that, not just aspiration.”  

For founders in the region hoping to build companies that are attractive acquisition targets, Al-Zaini suggested that the starting point is developing a defensible competitive advantage. According to him, that moat can take several forms, with one of them being a niche problem, solved deeply. “Some companies own a very specific problem for a very specific audience,” Al-Zaini explained. “That focus creates natural barriers—it’s hard for outsiders to replicate the domain expertise, the trust, or the community built around it.” Al-Zaini also pointed out that sometimes, the most valuable asset isn't the product; it's the people. “If a team deeply understands their product, their market, and their target audience in a way that fits the acquirer's long-term strategy, acquiring them is often faster than building that capability from scratch,” he said. A strong total addressable market and consistent revenue growth are also key factors, Al-Zaini added. “A company demonstrating real market size and year-over-year revenue growth signals both validation and momentum, two things acquirers are always looking for,” he shared. “This is what we practice at Foodics, and what we look for when we acquire.” 

Pictured in the lead image are, from left to right, Ahmad Al-Zaini, Mosab Al-Othmani, and George Henein. Image courtesy Foodics.