FAST Ventures Introduces MATTE to Revolutionise MENA’s Marketing Automation

Mohammed Fathy

Last updated 15-04-2026

4 min

FAST Ventures launches MATTE to build a “digital workforce” for MENA marketers.

It automates campaigns, reporting and optimisation, freeing teams from manual “faff”.

The tools were refined across 10,000 campaigns on the Platformance system.

Core automation is open-sourced, targeting agencies priced out of enterprise suites.

MATTE integrates major platforms, unifying marketing and revenue data in one workflow.

FAST Ventures has unveiled MATTE, a new company focused on building what it calls a “digital workforce” for modern marketing teams across the MENA region. Based in Dubai, the group says the venture is designed specifically for small and mid-sized agencies and in-house marketers, the teams that often need automation the most, yet usually find enterprise-grade tools out of reach.

In simple terms, MATTE develops AI agents, automation workflows and connected data systems that take over the operational side of performance marketing. Campaigns, for instance, are launched through predefined workflows instead of being rebuilt from zero every time. Performance is monitored continuously by AI agents rather than checked now and then, and reporting runs automatically. That frees up marketers to focus on strategy and client relationships, rather than getting bogged down in spreadsheets and manual tweaks, which, let’s be honest, can be a bit of a faff.

The company’s roots trace back to FAST Ventures’ own internal operations. Over the past three years, the group developed and refined these automation tools across more than 10,000 live campaigns, forming the backbone of its outcome-based marketing platform, Platformance. Now, it is opening up that technology to the wider market.

Waseem Afzal, CEO and Founder of FAST Ventures, described the thinking behind the move in a statement, saying the internal review of how teams spent their time led to “an uncomfortable” conclusion: too many hours were lost to reporting, data pulls and manual optimisation. The brief to developers was straightforward, fix it. The outcome, he said, is MATTE, built to return time and capacity to marketing teams so they can focus on work that drives growth.

And believe it or not, the company is taking the relatively bold step of open-sourcing the core automation engine behind Platformance. The idea is to give smaller agencies access to infrastructure that would otherwise require serious budgets and engineering support. I reckon this could be spot on for a region where scaling agencies often struggle between basic tools on one side and pricey enterprise systems on the other.

MATTE is built to be tech-agnostic, integrating with platforms that support open APIs. These include Google Ads, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Amazon Ads, Google Analytics and DV360. Beyond media buying, it connects with CRM systems like Salesforce and HubSpot, data warehouses such as BigQuery and Snowflake, mobile measurement platforms including AppsFlyer and Adjust, and even finance tools like QuickBooks and Zoho. The idea is to bring marketing, sales and revenue data into one workflow, with AI handling execution and real-time optimisation while humans remain in control through approval layers.

The timing is notable. The UAE and Saudi Arabia are the region’s most dynamic digital advertising markets, yet many SMB agencies still operate with fragmented systems and heavy manual processes. In Saudi in particular, Vision 2030 has accelerated digital adoption, pushing local teams to modernise quickly. MATTE positions itself in what it sees as a clear gap, between entry-level tools and complex enterprise suites, offering intelligent automation without the overhead of a full enterprise rollout.

Luqman Sohail, Head of MATTE, said in a statement that the company kept asking itself a simple question during development: does this feature free up a person to do something only they can do? That principle, he noted, shaped both the technology and the operating model. Crucially, MATTE was built with the bilingual, multi-platform reality of Gulf markets in mind, embedding Arabic and English campaign management from the outset rather than as an afterthought.

For those of us who spend time speaking with founders across MENA, this operational bottleneck comes up again and again. Agencies win clients but drown in reporting. Growth teams have ambition but lack infrastructure. At Arageek, we’ve seen how much energy founders spend just keeping the engine running. Tools that genuinely remove friction can be game-changers, if they deliver on their promise, of course.

MATTE, short for Marketing And Technology Transformation Enablement, says its technology was refined across thousands of live campaigns before being made available externally. Now, the real test begins, as agencies across the region decide whether this new entrant is indeed the automation partner they’ve been waiting for… or just another MarTech name in an already noisy space. Either way, it’s definately a space worth watching.

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