UAE-Headquartered MilkStraw AI Pockets US$2 Million Seed Round

UAE-headquartered artificial intelligence (AI) startup MilkStraw AI has bagged US$2 million in seed funding in a round led by Dubai-based venture capital firm VentureSouq, with participation from Ramallah-based investment firm Ibtikar Fund and France-based investment firm M Capital, as the company looks to scale its AI-powered cloud optimization platform and expand its footprint across the Middle East and North Africa. 

Founded by Jawad Shreim, Ibraheem Tuffaha, and Anas Abdullah in the US in 2024, MilkStraw builds software that automatically reduces startups’ cloud infrastructure costs by executing optimizations directly and charging only when tangible savings are delivered. The seed round follows a $600,000 pre-seed raise last year, led by Cairo-based startup accelerator Flat6Labs, with participation from UAE-based angel investment network Angel Spark and US-based early-stage investment firm Beyond Capital. 

Milkstraw operates as a fully remote organization, with its founding team spread across Dubai, Amman, Riyadh, Berlin, and San Francisco. Speaking to Inc. Arabia, Shreim explained that exposure to how startups operate globally played a central role in shaping MilkStraw’s product direction. According to Shreim, the company was born out of repeated, firsthand encounters with a problem that founders consistently struggled to address.

“Cloud problems are the same everywhere, and having a remote team helps with that a lot,” Shreim shared. “The idea came from a pattern we kept seeing. Startups bleeding money on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Founders who knew they were overpaying but couldn't do anything about it. The common advice was ‘throw a couple of engineers at it, and it's done.’ But most startups don't have engineers to spare. And honestly, even when they do, cloud optimization isn't what anyone wants to be working on. So, we built the thing we wished existed. We find the savings, we apply them, and we only charge when you actually save money. No dashboards to figure out. No recommendations sitting in a queue. The mission sounds almost too simple: change the way cloud engineers interact with cloud.” 

That way of thinking has also informed how MilkStraw approaches a market crowded with tools that promise insight but often fall short in practice. According to Shreim, the issue lies less in visibility and more in execution. “Everyone thinks cloud cost optimization is solved," he said. "You buy a tool, it shows you what to fix, your team fixes it. Done.  Except nobody's team actually fixes it. The dashboards are horrible. The recommendations pile up. The dashboards go stale. I've seen this dozens of times. So, we did something different. We don't show you what to do. We do it."

This distinction becomes especially clear when it comes to longer-term cost-saving strategies that many companies are hesitant to adopt. “Here's what that actually means: three-year savings plans and reserved instances are the most powerful way to cut AWS costs," Shreim explained. "But companies avoid them because of the commitment. If your usage drops, you're stuck paying for capacity you don't need. We take on that commitment so you don't have to. You get the discount without the lock-in. That's not a better tool. That's a different model entirely.” 

Since launching the platform, MilkStraw has grown its customer base to more than 100 startups managing their cloud environments through the product, including Cairo-based retail trading platform Thndr, Amman-based cloud communications company Maqsam, Dubai-based fintech Ziina, California-based AI company Beyond Limits, and Egypt-based digital services company Zero. Now, with fresh capital in place, the company is channeling its efforts into expanding both product capabilities and operations. MilkStraw is currently developing features such as The Feed, Right Sizing, and an AI-powered conversational interface that allows users to engage with their cloud infrastructure using natural language.

These efforts reflect broader shifts Shreim sees taking place across infrastructure and DevOps. “The split between 'understanding your cloud' and 'optimizing your cloud' is going to collapse," Shreim said. "Right now, these are different tools, different workflows, sometimes different teams. That doesn't make sense. You should be able to ask 'Why is my bill spiking?' and get an answer in seconds. Not dig through five dashboards and piece it together yourself.” 

Beyond consolidation, Shreim expects automation to play a much more active role in how infrastructure is managed as the industry evolves. “We're going to see tooling that actually does things, not just tells you what to do," he said. "The current model assumes engineers have time to act on recommendations. They don't. The next generation of infrastructure tools will be more autonomous. Less 'Here's what you should do,' and more 'We did it, here's what changed.' I think the companies that figure this out early will seem like magic to everyone else.” 

Reflecting on MilkStraw’s journey so far, Shreim also offered advice for founders building cloud and infrastructure tools today. “Build for the person who feels the pain, not just the person who understands the technical problem," he said. "We learned this the hard way. Early on, we built for DevOps engineers. Detailed dashboards, granular controls, all the information you could want. Very thorough. Turns out, customers didn't want all the details. They wanted the problem to go away."

"Here's what we missed: the founder feels the pain of the AWS bill every month," Shreim continued. "DevOps evaluates the tooling. But if you only build for DevOps, you end up with another tool that sits unused because nobody has time for it. The unlock for us was realizing that less information, delivered at the right time, beats more information that requires work to act on. That sounds obvious now. It wasn't obvious when we were building.  It all comes back to this: we need to change the way cloud engineers interact with cloud, from scratch." 

Pictured in the lead images are MilkStraw AI co-founders Jawad Shreim, Ibraheem Tuffaha, and Anas Abdullah. Image courtesy MilkStraw.