Startup Profile

• Founded: 2023

• Core Solution: A direct-to-consumer mobile platform for designing and ordering customised cakes, expanding into broader celebrations and gifting products

• Markets Served: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait

• Funding Rounds: 

  • Pre-seed (February 2025): $1.3M 

  • Seed (April 2026): $3M 

• Total Funding Received: $4.3M

• Growth Outlook: Bringing production in-house through a central facility in Dammam and a network of cloud bakeries, and evolving into a full celebrations platform spanning gifting, decoration, and events. Expansion into the wider MENA region with Egypt planned as the next market entry. 

What is Lola?

Lola is a Bahrain-founded direct-to-consumer platform that lets customers design and order customised cakes through a mobile app, building and previewing a cake visually and completing a custom order in about a minute. Once an order is placed, Lola delivers the cake to the customer's door or directly to a gift recipient, which places the product firmly in the celebrations and gifting space rather than everyday food delivery. 

Lola was founded by Othman Janahi, who built it through the entrepreneur-in-residence programme at Calo, a Bahraini foodtech success story, through their venture-building track that backs experienced operators to launch new companies from within Calo. In its early stages, the platform operated largely as a software layer connecting customers with local bakeries, an approach that made it quick to enter new markets. With its 2026 funding, the company began bringing production in-house, building a central production facility in Saudi Arabia and a network of distributed cloud bakeries, which are dedicated production kitchens that exist to fulfil online orders rather than to serve walk-in customers. The aim is greater control over quality and consistency as order volumes grow.

How was Lola built?

Lola began with a familiar frustration. Ordering a customised cake has long meant endless back-and-forth with a bakery, trying to describe an idea that exists only in the customer's mind, and often ending up with something that doesn't match. The gap between what a customer pictures and what they receive is what Lola set out to close.

Lola's founding insight was that technology could remove that guesswork: by letting customers design and preview a cake visually and order it in about a minute, it replaced an imprecise conversation with a clear, self-serve experience with cakes as the entry point into the wider world of celebrations and gifting.

Its competitive edge lies in this technology-driven personalisation applied to a traditionally fragmented industry. The model began deliberately asset-light, a software layer over existing bakeries that allowed rapid expansion across markets, and is now moving toward vertical integration, with in-house production designed to protect quality as the company scales.

How has Lola grown?

Lola's growth has been driven by funding, geographic expansion, and a deliberate shift in how it produces and delivers its products.

The company raised a $1.3M pre-seed in February 2025, followed by a $3M seed in April 2026 that brought total funding to $4.3M. The 2026 round was led by Vision Ventures, with participation from Aljazira Capital, Seedra Ventures, and Plus VC, and was earmarked for the company's move into in-house production.

That capital fueled a rapid expansion from Lola's Bahrain base. After launching in September 2023, it entered Riyadh & the United Arab Emirates in 2024, and continued to expand to Qatar and Kuwait, giving it a presence across five GCC markets by 2026. According to the figures the company reported in 2025, Lola had grown roughly fivefold since its launch across size, volume of cakes baked and number of occasions celebrated. By 2026, the platform had reached over 121,500 registered users and more than 43,000 cakes baked and sold.

The most significant change came in 2026, when Lola decided to bring production in-house. Building a central production facility in Dammam and a network of cloud bakeries marked a move from coordinating third-party bakeries to controlling production directly, a step aimed at consistency and quality at scale. The app itself continued to evolve, adding features such as bundles and self-serve order cancellation with instant refunds. Looking ahead, the company has signaled an ambition to grow beyond cakes into a broader celebrations platform encompassing gifting, decoration, and event services.

How did the ecosystem enable Lola's growth?

Lola's trajectory reflects the strength of Bahrain's ecosystem, which served both as the network that connected it to capital and mentorship and as a launchpad to the wider Gulf.

 Lola's story shows how one Bahraini success can pave the way for the next. It emerged from the entrepreneur-in-residence programme at Calo, a Bahraini foodtech company that backs experienced operators to build and launch new ventures using its resources and mentorship, before they spin out as independent companies. Calo's network also opened Lola's first doors to capital, with a co-founder introducing it to the investors who led its pre-seed round. 

Bahrain's institutional support has also given Lola a public platform: the Labour Fund (Tamkeen) featured Lola among a select group of Bahraini scaleups at the 2025 Global Entrepreneurship Week showcase, placing its founder on a panel alongside peers such as Eat App and FLOOSS to discuss regional expansion.

The ecosystem also served as a compact test market and a springboard to the region. Lola validated its concept at home before expanding rapidly into Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Kuwait, with a wider MENA expansion, including Egypt, set as the next step. The ability to prove the model in an accessible market and then scale outward gave Lola a practical path from a single-market idea to a multi-market business.

Reflecting on that journey the founder, Othamn Janahi, credited Bahrain’s ecosystem: “Lola’s journey began in Bahrain, and we are proud to have grown within an ecosystem shaped by strong government support, visionary leadership, and a clear commitment to empowering businesses.

As entrepreneurs, this kind of environment gives us the confidence to build, innovate, and think beyond borders. From early-stage support to market access and growth opportunities, Bahrain’s ecosystem has played an important role in enabling companies like Lola to expand beyond the Kingdom.

We are grateful to Tamkeen for their role in supporting our journey, and to Bahrain’s wider ecosystem for enabling us to build from Bahrain and scale our ambitions across the region.”

The Big Picture

Lola's journey from a 2023 launch in Bahrain to a five-market business backed by $4.3M in funding shows how a sharply defined consumer problem can become a scaling platform. The gap it set out to close was simple and real: ordering a custom cake was frustrating and imprecise, for customers and bakeries alike. By turning that experience into a fast, visual, self-serve app, and then building the production capability to deliver it consistently, Lola converted a single frustration into a regional celebrations business. Bahrain's ecosystem, through local venture backing, a foodtech network that connected the company to capital and mentorship, and a compact market that served as a springboard to the Gulf, provided the conditions for Lola to build, validate, and scale.