UAE-Based Peekabox Bags US$1.5 Million Seed Round To Expand Its Surplus Food Marketplace

Dubai-based foodtech platform Peekabox has raised a US$1.5 million seed round from a network of regional operators and investors to support its expansion across the UAE and lay the groundwork for a wider GCC rollout, with Saudi Arabia identified as its next target. 

Founded by brothers Hasan Sarwar and Omair Sarwar in the UAE in May 2025, Peekabox operates a surplus food marketplace that allows restaurants, cafes, bakeries, and grocery stores to sell freshly prepared surplus food at discounts ranging from 50 percent to 70 percent. Through the platform, customers can reserve surprise boxes via the app and collect them in-store during designated pick-up windows. 

The company emerged from the founders' decision to leave their careers in investment banking and address a challenge they saw firsthand. The idea took shape after Hasan noticed supermarkets and cafes routinely discarding unsold food that remained suitable for consumption. Explaining the problem the company aims to address, Hasan, co-founder and CEO of Peekabox, told Inc. Arabia, "The mission is deliberately dual. Cut food waste, and ease the cost of living. Nearly 40 percent of food is wasted in the UAE every year, at a cost of around AED6 billion ($1.63 billion). We sit on the consumer end of that value chain, turning food that would have been binned into something affordable for residents, and incremental revenue for partners." 

That mission has been reinforced by strong early traction on both the supply and demand sides. Before launching the platform, Peekabox had signed more than 1,000 stores across over 40 food and beverage and grocery brands, including Carrefour, Costa Coffee, Tim Hortons, Dunkin’, Krispy Kreme, Paul, Eataly, Union Coop, Cinnabon, Pret A Manger, Armani Cafe, Al Maya, Choithrams, Grandiose, Address Hotels, and Peet’s Coffee. Its franchise partners include Majid Al Futtaim, Apparel Group, Azadea, Cravia, Americana, and Emirates Leisure Retail. Following its launch in May, the company surpassed 70,000 downloads within three weeks, reached the top spot on the App Store, and saw its surprise boxes sell out almost daily. 

This combination of a large addressable problem and a proven business model has gone on to shape investor interest in Peekabox. "Investors didn't back a feel-good idea," Hasan pointed out. "They backed a proven model with real unit economics. This category has been built before, and scaled across more than 20 countries; so, the question was never whether surplus food sells, it was whether this team could execute it here. What gave people confidence was that we had the supply side locked before launch. We signed every major franchise group in the region because it's an industry-felt problem, and they support the mission. When the brands you'd want on day one are already there, the demand side takes care of itself." 

Hasan also highlighted that Peekabox's appeal extended beyond the environmental impact to the economics underpinning the business. "The commercial logic is also clean," he noted. "Partners recover revenue on food they were paying to throw away; so, for them, it's found money, not a cost. That's why the round was oversubscribed. One of our investors, who ran a major grocery business across the region, told me it took him seconds to say yes, because food waste was a problem he'd fought as a CEO for years. When operators who've lived the problem are writing checks, that's the strongest validation there is." 

While the fundraising process for Peekabox unfolded against a backdrop of regional uncertainty, Sarwar said that it ultimately only served to reinforce the company's value proposition. "On the geopolitical climate, I'd be honest and say capital in the UAE held up remarkably well," Hasan said. "There was regional noise, but UAE investment stayed resilient through that period, and our raise closed inside it. If anything, our model leans into uncertainty, rather than away from it. When cost-of-living pressure rises, demand for discounted food goes up, and when footfall softens, partner surplus goes up. So, the macro backdrop actually sharpened the pitch, rather than weakening it." 

Looking ahead, Peekabox is planning to build on its momentum in the UAE while preparing for regional expansion. Saudi Arabia has emerged as the next target market, given that it is known to have an estimated 4.1 million tons of surplus food annually, and more than 137,000 addressable stores. But as Peekabox prepares for its next phase of growth, Sarwar is clear that the company's success will depend on adapting the model to local market realities.

"Saudi Arabia is the natural next market, and our technology was built to travel from the start,” Hasan said. "But I'd be wary of treating the GCC as one market. The differences will be real. On customer behavior, Saudi Arabia is a much larger, younger, more mobile-first population, and the geography is far more spread out. Dubai is dense, so pickup windows are easy. In Riyadh or Jeddah, you're dealing with longer drive times and different neighborhood patterns, which change how you cluster partners and design collection. On merchant adoption, the UAE gave us an advantage in that a huge share of the market sits under a handful of franchise groups, so signing one group unlocks hundreds of stores. Saudi Arabia has scale, but you have to rebuild those relationships locally, and earn trust with operators who haven't seen us run yet. Operationally, the biggest challenge is the same one we obsess over here, which is supply consistency. Our risk has never been demand. It's making sure customers open the app and reliably find boxes from brands they love. Solving that across a bigger, more dispersed market is the real work. We want to be deep and excellent in the UAE before we stretch, not thin across two countries at once." 

Meanwhile, from a long-term perspective, Hasan suggested that the market opportunity underpinning Peekabox's growth is only beginning to take shape. "I think we're at the very start of a shift from food waste being a back-of-house afterthought to being a managed part of the business," Hasan said. "A few years ago, surplus was just a cost line that got written off quietly. Now, it's becoming a procurement decision, a sustainability metric, and, increasingly, a revenue channel. The UAE has committed to halving food loss and waste by 2030 in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and that direction is only going one way. For consumers, I think buying surplus will lose any stigma entirely and just become normal, the same way buying refurbished electronics did. It's not lesser food. It's fresh, it's the same brands people already know, it just would have been thrown away." 

That broader shift also underpins the role Peekabox aims to play within the sector over the long term. "Our long-term role is to be the default layer that sits between every food business with surplus, and every consumer who wants it," Hasan said. "Food waste is a very large value chain, with issues before production, after production, and at the landfill, and we're all solving the same problem at different stages. We're focused on the end of that chain, the last mile between an unsold croissant, and someone who'll happily eat it. If we do our job, surplies stops being waste, and becomes inventory." 

For Hasan, maintaining that balance between impact and commercial viability is essential not only for Peekabox's growth, but also for founders building businesses around real-world challenges. "Make the impact and the economics the same thing, not two competing goals,” Hasan advised. “The mistake I see is founders treating purpose as a reason customers should forgive a weaker product—they won't. Our customers download Peekabox to save money on brands they love. The fact that it also cuts food waste is what makes it durable and what brings partners and regulators on side, but the affordability is what drives the download. Build for the commercial pull first, and let the impact compound underneath it. The second thing is that distribution is a grind, and there's no clever shortcut. We spent more than a year convincing brands to join a platform that didn't exist yet, before we had a single user. We tried everything, and what actually worked was picking up the phone, because you get one shot to make the case. Impact gets you in the room. Execution is what closes. And surround yourself with people who've done it before. The single biggest unlock for us was the support here, with senior operators willing to open doors, make introductions, and share advice with first-time founders in their mid-twenties. That access is rare, and you should chase it relentlessly." 

Pictured in the lead image are Peekabox co-founders Omair Sarwar and Hasan Sarwar. Image courtesy Peekabox.