Ai Everything Abu Dhabi brings 150 AI startups to the UAE capital
The two-day Abu Dhabi event puts 150-plus startups in front of investors managing US$100 billion, from industrial safety AI to Arabic-language customer agents.
Anecdoted Desk Anecdoted Desk covers rolling funding rounds and startup news across the UAE and MENA -- the wire for deals as they're announced. team@anecdoted.com
More than 150 AI startups will take the show floor at Ai Everything Abu Dhabi, which runs 6 to 7 October at the ADNEC Centre. The wider event draws over 400 global technology companies. Its startup track, Ai StartX Everything, puts founders in front of more than 200 investors who manage US$100 billion in assets across 30 countries.
Portugal: software risk, resolved under human sign-off
VisionHammer, a Portuguese software assurance company, arrives with a platform that maps the risk buried in enterprise software systems, diagnoses it and clears it, while keeping a person in charge of every change. The system reads an error, finds its cause, writes a fix, tests it, then hands a pull request to an engineer at the customer for approval. In one production deployment, the time needed to close an incident dropped from roughly five hours to about four minutes on average, freeing the team to build product instead of maintaining it. Resolution happens inside the customer's own infrastructure. Code analysis runs either in VisionHammer's EU cloud or on the customer's premises, which suits regulated sectors. On the stand the company is showing CodeScan, which analyses code security at every release, and Assessment, which maps and diagnoses a company's systems. It is also signalling its expansion into the Gulf.
"The biggest demand isn't for more AI features," said Tiago Silva, co-founder and COO of VisionHammer. "It's for AI you can trust on the systems that matter, with human control and full auditability."
Singapore: watching the cameras nobody has time to watch
Singapore-headquartered Ailytics sells AI video analytics for industrial safety and operations. AilyssaX, its vision language model platform, converts existing CCTV into live safety and operational intelligence for heavy industry. It flags hazards, checks whether crews follow work procedures, and uses visual reasoning to cut false alarms. No extra hardware is required, and deployment takes days. The company has passed 400 deployments in more than 15 countries, with Changi Airport Group, DHL, Laing O'Rourke and Obayashi among its customers. After a recent Series A round it is expanding in the Middle East, including new work with regional energy and infrastructure operators.
"The problem we solve is simple: industrial sites already have thousands of cameras, but nobody can watch them all," said Tan Wei Zhuang, CEO of Ailytics. "Our AI does, detecting safety hazards, verifying compliance with work procedures, and reducing false alarms through advanced visual reasoning."
Saudi Arabia: Arabic-language agents for customer service
Lucidya, the Saudi company behind an Agentic CX Platform, will demonstrate its AI Agent. The platform supports 17 Arabic dialects at above 92 per cent accuracy and draws on billions of data points to read customer and market signals. Visitors get an early look at Agentic Workflows, built to run customer journeys end to end across enterprise systems. Lucidya holds ISO/IEC 42001 certification and meets PDPL, GDPR and SOC 2 requirements, which matters for government and regulated buyers.
"What we're demonstrating is how organisations can move from simply understanding customer signals to autonomously resolving issues through a governed, enterprise-ready system," said Yara Milbes, SVP Marketing & Growth at Lucidya.
UAE: sovereign AI that stays on the premises
Dubai-registered MetisJean, an AI research and development firm working on sovereign enterprise intelligence, uses the event to launch Jean 1001, an operating system for AI. A live demonstration shows the platform connecting to existing enterprise systems and tracing its own reasoning back to source. Jean operates inside a customer's infrastructure and records every action on an immutable, audit-ready ledger. In some use cases it cuts token consumption by up to 90 per cent.
"Our ambition is not simply to sell into the Gulf, but to build sovereign enterprise AI here, with Gulf customers as the reference, and take it outward," said Alexander Haywood, Founder and CEO of MetisJean. "Stop renting intelligence. Start owning it."
US: an agent that lives on the screen
Newrunio, a US agentic AI research lab, is introducing Personal Super-Intelligence (PAI) 1.2 to a global market for the first time. PAI is an always-on, screen-aware floating agent that sits inside a user's digital environment rather than pulling them into a separate tool. It reads what is on screen as it happens, offers contextual suggestions without being asked, executes tasks with a single click and runs several agentic workflows in parallel. The goal is to end the tab-switching that AI tools tend to create.
"PAI is designed not simply to answer questions, but to understand the user's contexts, proactively anticipate needs, and take meaningful action within the workflow securely," said Eon Yulheon Seung, Co-Founder and CEO of Newrunio.
The investor side
Ai StartX Everything's Investor Programme connects founders with investors, sovereign funds, technology companies and enterprise buyers. Its Supernova AI Global Pitch Competition puts five finalists in front of investors and industry leaders, competing for equity-free prizes.
inD organises the event. Abu Dhabi's Department of Government Enablement is Host Partner, and Solutions+, a Mubadala company, is Global Partner. Local institutions including ATRC, First Abu Dhabi Bank and Hub71 take part alongside AWS, Alibaba Cloud, Microsoft, Mistral AI and ASUS.
