Dubai-based FAST Ventures has launched MATTE, a new company focused on building an AI-powered marketing studio for small and medium-sized agencies and in-house marketing teams across the MENA region. The new venture aims to automate the operational heavy lifting of performance marketing, freeing up teams to concentrate on strategy and growth.
Quick Facts
- New AI marketing studio for MENA’s SMBs and agencies
- Tech developed and tested on over 10,000 live campaigns
- Integrates with Google, Meta, TikTok, Salesforce, and more
From In-House Tool to Public Platform
MATTE’s core technology was not developed in a vacuum. Its AI agents and automation workflows originated as the internal operational engine for Platformance, FAST Ventures’ outcome-based marketing platform. This system was refined over three years across more than 10,000 live campaigns before the decision was made to offer it as a standalone product.
By open-sourcing the technology, MATTE is making its infrastructure available to smaller marketing teams that lack the resources to build similar systems from scratch.
“We looked at how our own teams were spending their time and the answer was uncomfortable,” said Waseem Afzal, CEO and Founder of FAST Ventures. “The majority of the day was going on work that should not require a person. Reporting. Data pulls. Manual optimisations. Campaign setups that took days when they should take hours. We set our builders the task of solving it. What came out of that is MATTE.”
Bridging the MarTech Gap in UAE and KSA
MATTE is positioned to fill a specific gap in the region’s two largest digital advertising markets, the UAE and Saudi Arabia. While large enterprises have access to sophisticated MarTech platforms, smaller agencies often rely on fragmented, manual tools not designed for the complexities of Gulf marketing operations.
The company aims to provide intelligent automation without the high cost and complex implementation of enterprise-level software. This is particularly relevant in Saudi Arabia, where digital transformation initiatives under Vision 2030 are increasing the demand for marketing infrastructure that local teams can operate independently.
A Natively Bilingual and Integrated System
Built specifically for the MENA market, MATTE addresses regional needs from its foundation. The platform is designed to manage bilingual Arabic and English campaigns and integrates with the mix of platforms most effective in the Gulf.
MATTE connects with major advertising channels like Google Ads, Meta, TikTok, and Amazon Ads, as well as business systems including Salesforce, HubSpot, BigQuery, and QuickBooks. This allows teams to build, launch, monitor, and report on campaigns across all platforms from a single workspace, with AI agents handling real-time execution and optimization.
“Every brief we gave ourselves came back to the same question: does this free up a person to do something only they can do?” stated Luqman Sohail, Head of MATTE. “The result is a company shaped entirely by the reality of running marketing in this region, on these platforms, for these clients.”
About MATTE
MATTE (Marketing And Technology Transformation Enablement) is an AI-powered MarTech company and a subsidiary of FAST Ventures. It develops AI agents, automation workflows, and connected data systems for SMB agencies and marketing teams across the MENA region. Its technology was refined across more than 10,000 live campaigns within the FAST Ventures group before its public launch.
Source: Zawya
