The Presight-Shorooq Fund I, a $100 million global AI innovation fund, has announced its inaugural investments, backing five pioneering AI startups across the United States and the UAE in its first quarter of operations. The fund is a strategic partnership between ADX-listed AI and big data analytics leader Presight, a G42 company, and Abu Dhabi-based multi-strategy investment firm Shorooq.
A Strategic Blend of Global Innovation and Regional Infrastructure
After assessing over 1,000 companies, the fund has deployed its initial capital to fulfill a key mandate: connecting the world’s most promising AI companies with the UAE’s premier sovereign infrastructure and the broader MENA capital ecosystem. The investments create a clear pathway from frontier AI innovation to large-scale implementation, leveraging the region’s resources to accelerate growth.
The selected portfolio companies are already backed by world-class firms including Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Google Ventures, Quiet Capital, First Round Capital, and Y Combinator, alongside prominent angel investors such as Yann LeCun and Peter Thiel.
The Inaugural Portfolio
The fund’s first cohort of investments targets critical gaps across sovereign cloud, construction, enterprise intelligence, and mobile applications.
NodeShift (Abu Dhabi): Building the first AI-native sovereign cloud platform, NodeShift offers a consolidated Rust-based system for virtualization, cloud management, and the AI stack. It aims to replace fragmented legacy infrastructure and provides a true air-gapped system for high-security clients, offering GPU workloads at up to 65% cheaper rates than public clouds.
Candid (San Francisco): This vertical AI company has developed an AI agent that dramatically reduces pre-construction bidding preparation time for engineering and construction firms from 12 weeks to just one or two. By tightening bid error margins, Candid can potentially double the revenue for firms by enabling a higher volume of profitable bids.
Hebbia (New York): An enterprise-grade AI platform designed to handle complex knowledge work in finance, law, and government. Hebbia’s Matrix interface acts as a collaborative AI agent that can ingest and analyze millions of pages of private data, providing end-to-end analysis with citation-backed verification.
Blue (San Francisco): A voice AI company developing the first functional action model for mobile. Blue bypasses traditional app API limitations by directly simulating user interface controls, enabling hands-free command execution across mobile applications through a patent-pending USB-C hardware dongle.
Crunched (San Francisco): Operating as an AI-powered Excel analyst, Crunched audits complex financial models for errors, pulls data from various sources into templates, and builds analyses from scratch. The tool is targeted at power users in consulting and investment finance, with early adopters reporting productivity boosts of over 2x.
Building a Comprehensive AI Ecosystem
Launched in September 2023, the Presight-Shorooq Fund builds upon the success of the Presight AI-Startup Accelerator, which was announced at Expand North Star 2023 in Dubai. Now onboarding its second cohort, the accelerator provides early-stage AI startups from MENA, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia with mentorship, high-performance computing, cloud services, and access to foundational language models.
The accelerator helps startups achieve market fit before scaling, while the Presight-Shorooq Fund provides the subsequent capital and infrastructure access, creating a powerful, end-to-end support system for AI innovation in the region.
About Presight-Shorooq Fund I
The Presight-Shorooq Fund I is a $100 million global AI innovation fund launched in September 2023. It is a joint initiative between Presight, a G42 company specializing in AI and big data analytics, and Shorooq, an Abu Dhabi-based investment firm. The fund focuses on investing in leading AI companies globally and connecting them with the MENA region’s capital ecosystem and sovereign infrastructure.
Source: Middle East AI News
