Relik Secures Seed Funding to Revolutionise Global Object Authentication with AI

Relik, a home-grown UAE platform using AI to authenticate everything from rare collectibles to cultural artefacts, has closed its seed round and is now gearing up for a wider push into sports, luxury and heritage markets. The funding came from KBW Ventures, Naatt Holding, Fort Holding and Ayman Sejiny, and it’s meant to speed up the rollout of what the startup calls the Relik Vault — essentially an AI-powered, tamper-proof system that helps brands and institutions prove an item’s provenance in seconds using nothing more than a smartphone.

What struck me while going through the announcement is how sharply it taps into a global worry. With counterfeits ballooning into a market worth more than $467 billion, and AI making it harder to tell what’s real and what’s been cleverly generated, the timing feels spot on. Walid Tarabih, the company’s founder and CEO, put it quite bluntly when he said counterfeits don’t just harm economies but “erase identity, creativity and truth.” I reckon that sentiment hits close to home for many creators across the region — I’ve heard similar frustrations from startup teams Arageek has met over the years.

KBW Ventures’ founder, Prince Khaled bin Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud, also weighed in, describing Relik’s work as a step toward a “new global standard for truth and trust.” Big words, yes, but the tech behind it is interesting enough. Instead of relying on NFC chips, QR codes or RFID tags — which, frankly, are a bit of a faff to implement at scale — Relik uses AI to give each object a kind of “digital DNA.” So the item itself becomes the key to its own identity. And believe it or not, this means anyone with a smart device can check authenticity in seconds.

The company isn’t building this alone either. John Tsioris, best known for founding InstaShop and steering it through one of the MENA region’s most notable startup exits, joined early as a pre-seed investor and co-founder. His operational experience should help Relik avoid some of the classic growing pains; on the flip side, scaling deep-tech platforms is never a walk in the park, so the next phase will test how quickly their model can be adopted by museums, athletes, luxury brands and auction houses already exploring partnerships with them.

From my own time speaking with entrepreneurs across the region — often in those slightly chaotic coffee-shop catch-ups that seem to happen by accident — one pattern keeps resurfacing: trust is everything. When trust breaks, markets slow, collectors hesitate, and creators lose out. Relik’s pitch leans directly into that gap, and while I’m not a fan of buzzwords like “immutable provenance,” the idea of restoring confidence in physical objects without slapping extra hardware onto them feels, well… refreshing.

The team says their aim is to make the world’s stories “verifiable again.” That may sound a tad poetic for a tech outfit, but in an age where even photos can be faked at the tap of a screen, it’s hard not to see why investors are chuffed to bits with the concept. As Relik continues to expand from its UAE base, it’ll be worth watching whether this blend of AI and cultural preservation can really scale — or if, like many bold ideas before it, it risks moving too fast, too soon. Either way, the mission is clear, even if authenticity itself has become harder than ever to pin down, definately.

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