UAE-based regulatory technology (RegTech) startup Qadi has officially emerged from stealth, announcing a pre-seed funding round led by Incubayt. The company is developing the Middle East’s first sovereign regulatory compliance platform, aiming to transform how law firms and institutions in the region manage their legal and compliance workflows using artificial intelligence.
Automating Compliance with Sovereign AI Agents
Built specifically for the legal and regulatory frameworks of the MENAT region, Qadi’s platform deconstructs local laws, regulations, and internal company policies, encoding their rules into AI agents. These agents can then make compliance determinations and proactively integrate checks into business workflows, ensuring data sovereignty by operating within the institution’s own environment.
Qadi’s AI agents are designed to handle fragmented legal and compliance tasks and turn them into streamlined, end-to-end processes. For example, one set of agents can manage the initial review of contracts like Non-disclosure Agreements (NDAs) and Master Service Agreements (MSAs), verifying them against local requirements and internal playbooks before routing them for approval. Another set can be tasked with scanning marketing and media assets to ensure they comply with regional financial promotions and advertising rules.
The Engine for Compliance Automation
The newly acquired capital will be used to expand Qadi’s team of AI and Legal Engineers and to support the platform’s rollout to a select group of law firms and financial institutions across the GCC.
Mohamad El Charif, Founder at Qadi, explained the company’s unique approach: “Qadi is doing something distinct. We aren’t just building a copilot; we’re building the engine for compliance automation. By bridging the gap between strategic legal advisory and AI, Qadi is positioning itself as the backbone of the next generation of legal services in the region.”
Investor Insight on Sovereign AI
The need for a regionally-focused, sovereign AI solution was echoed by the lead investor. As regulatory AI becomes core infrastructure globally, a tailored approach is critical for the Middle East market.
Sami Khoreibi, Investor and Founder of Incubayt, commented, “Around the world, regulatory AI is moving from experiments to core infrastructure but in this region, it has to be sovereign and deeply tuned to local rules. Qadi is taking the right approach of starting with local laws, regulations and policies, encoding them as agents, and deploying them inside the institution’s own environment. That combination of agentic automation, regulatory depth and data sovereignty is exactly what our most sophisticated clients are asking for.”
About Qadi
Founded in 2025 by Mohamad El Charif, Qadi is a sovereign regulatory compliance platform that converts local laws, regulations, and internal policies into AI agents that automate compliance determinations for law firms and institutions across MENAT. The platform combines regional legal expertise, regulatory depth, and data sovereignty to provide an AI-driven compliance infrastructure built specifically for Middle Eastern regulatory systems.
Source: Zawya
