UAI AI push: Dubai start-up Ayan raises Dh2.2m pre-seed

The UAE’s push to embed artificial intelligence across its economy has gained another marker, with Dubai-based start-up Ayan securing Dh2.2 million in pre-seed funding as it prepares to scale beyond the Middle East and North Africa. The raise, sourced from strategic global business angels, comes against a backdrop of deliberate state policy: in April, the UAE Cabinet approved a plan to run half of government services on agentic AI within two years, under the National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence 2031.

That policy direction is reflected in the numbers. AI and AI-enabled companies across MENA raised $678 million in the first half of 2026, an increase of 81 percent from a year earlier, according to data platform MAGNiTT. The UAE accounted for 93 percent of that total, a concentration that underscores how far the country’s national strategy has shaped where capital flows.

Ayan positions itself within this environment as the MENA leader in front office intelligence for AI-led buying. Its premise is that brands now face a governance gap of sorts: consumers encounter a company first through AI systems that describe it in words the brand never wrote, and only later through human advisors briefed on last year’s brand book. Pablo Charron, Ayan’s founder and Chief Executive Officer, framed the problem in those terms. “There’s a version of your brand you’ve never read. It’s the only one your customers meet,” he said. “And it’s already deciding who gets recommended, without you in the room. Ayan reads that version, acts on it wherever the customer decides, and measures what moved.”

The company’s platform operates as a loop. It has analysed millions of data points on how AI describes brands, measured against each brand’s own positioning. It then acts across every channel where a sale happens, from product pages and campaigns before they go live to the phones of individual sales advisors, and measures what each action changed in AI answers. What customers ask at the counter flows back in and becomes the next thing Ayan fixes.

Charron sees this as filling a structural blind spot in existing software. Tools that track AI visibility stop at the screen, he notes, while clienteling tools have no knowledge of what AI has said. Ayan follows the customer from the AI answer to the physical counter, and already serves more than 50 brands across MENA, Europe and North America.

Meanwhile, the funding round was accompanied by governance appointments of its own. Vincent Carvalho, Chief Growth Officer, M&A Group at IFS and the company’s former President for Asia-Pacific Japan, Middle East and Africa, joined as founding board member. Christian Pedersen, Group Chief Executive Officer at Cegid and formerly chief product officer at IFS and SAP, came on as adviser.

Carvalho argued the opportunity is institutional in scale. “Brands everywhere are losing the first conversation with their customers to AI, and most cannot even hear it. That is the biggest blind spot in front office software, and one of its biggest opportunities in a decade. Ayan is built to close it, starting in MENA and scaling globally,” he said.

Pedersen placed the shift in the context of how front office systems were originally designed. “Front office systems were built for a customer who talks to the brand first. That customer now talks to AI first. Ayan shows brands, independently, what AI tells their customers, and lets every team act on it,” he said.

Chakir El Messaoudi, who co-founded Ayan with Charron and serves as Chief Growth Officer, described the changed role of the human advisor. “The advisor used to be the first expert a customer met. Now they are the second,” he said. “Our job is to make sure they are the better-informed one.”

For a market where government policy is explicitly steering adoption of agentic AI, Ayan’s expansion plans suggest the private sector is moving in step with the national mandate. The accountability question of who speaks for a brand when AI answers first is becoming a boardroom concern, and it remains to be seen how quickly regulators and boards will formalise an answer.