Abu Dhabi’s $100M AI Fund Makes Fast Moves with 5 Startup Investments

Abu Dhabi’s push into artificial intelligence is picking up pace. Just a few months after its launch in September 2025, the $100 million Presight–Shorooq Fund I has already deployed capital into five AI startups across the US and the UAE. For a first quarter, that’s no small feat.

The fund, formed through a partnership between Presight – part of G42 – and investment firm Shorooq, is targeting early-stage “AI-first” companies. In its first 120 days, the team reviewed more than 1,000 opportunities before backing five names: Nodeshift, Candid, Hebbia, Blue and Crunched. The founders behind these startups come from heavyweight institutions including DeepMind, Google X, Meta and Stanford, which gives a sense of the calibre the fund is chasing.

From what has been shared, the portfolio spans what insiders like to call “frontier intelligence”, everything from agentic reasoning systems and physical AI to sovereign cloud infrastructure. In simple words, these are tools and platforms designed not just to impress in demos, but to plug into real industries and heavily regulated environments.

Dr Bilal Baloch, Partner at Shorooq and the fund’s lead, said the original ambition was to connect top-tier AI innovators with the capital base, regulatory environment and market access available in the UAE and wider region. Assessing over 1,000 deals and closing investments in five companies outside the home market within roughly four months, he noted, was an early signal that the strategy is taking shape. He added that the founders selected are pushing AI into practical territory, from embedding voice interfaces into applications to automating large-scale industries, allowing the fund to back multiple layers of the AI stack.

Magzhan Kenesbai, Chief Growth Officer at Presight, emphasised that AI only delivers lasting value when it operates inside real systems. The first batch of investments, he said, reflects a focus on secure infrastructure, vertical intelligence platforms and edge-native technologies built for complex, regulated settings. The broader aim is to move innovation from the lab into implementation at scale.

What makes this particularly interesting is the company these startups keep. The five portfolio firms are also backed by major global investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, GV, Quiet Capital, First Round Capital and Y Combinator. Well-known angel investors including Yann LeCun, Paul Graham and Peter Thiel are in the mix too. In venture terms, that kind of cap table is spot on – it signals strong due diligence and shared conviction.

The fund’s strategy is quite deliberate: focus on founders building AI-native products with defensible data advantages, clear distribution channels or control over critical infrastructure. In other words, not just flashy models, but businesses with moats. That said, AI hype is everywhere right now, and I’m not a fan of capital being thrown around simply because something has “AI” in the pitch deck. This approach, at least on paper, feels more measured.

For readers who follow Arageek, the bigger picture is hard to ignore. The UAE has been positioning itself as a bridge between East and West in technology, and this fund is another brick in that wall. Portfolio companies will gain access not only to capital but also to Presight’s AI infrastructure and G42’s wider ecosystem, alongside Shorooq’s experience scaling ventures across MENA and Asia.

I remember speaking to a founder in Dubai last year who said raising growth capital locally used to be a bit of a faff, especially for deep tech. Things are shifting fast. Vehicles like this one suggest Abu Dhabi wants to do more than just write cheques – it wants to anchor globally competitive AI companies within its own sovereign infrastructure.

Shorooq itself, founded in 2017, operates as a multi-strategy investment firm spanning venture capital, credit, private equity and real assets, all through what it describes as a tech-native lens. The Presight–Shorooq Fund I reflects that broader ambition: investing across fintech, smart cities, energy, Industry 4.0 and deep tech, while rooting activity in Abu Dhabi.

It’s still early days, of course. Five investments do not make a legacy. But deploying capital at this pace definatly signals intent. And believe it or not, in the fast-moving world of AI, intent – backed by infrastructure and serious partners – can go a long way.

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