Abu Dhabi, UAE: Since it launched in September 2025, The Presight-Shorooq Fund I, a $100 million global AI innovation fund, has invested in five cutting-edge AI startups led by experienced alumni from DeepMind, Google X, Meta, and Stanford across the U.S. and UAE markets. These companies are Nodeshift, Candid, Hebbia, Blue and Crunched.

Launched as a strategic partnership between Shorooq and Presight (a G42 Company), the fund is fulfilling its high-conviction mandate to bridge the world’s most promising AI companies with the UAE’s premier sovereign infrastructure and the broader MENA capital ecosystem. The initial cohort represents a strategic cross-section of "frontier intelligence", spanning from agentic reasoning and physical AI to sovereign cloud.

Across these investments, the fund has partnered alongside some of the most respected names in global venture capital and technology. Portfolio companies are backed by firms such as Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Index Ventures, Google Ventures (GV), Quiet Capital, First Round Capital, and Y Combinator, alongside iconic angel investors including Yann LeCun, Paul Graham, and Peter Thiel. The fund’s strategy is deliberate: back world-class founders building AI-native products with defensible data advantages, distribution leverage, or infrastructure control.

Dr. Bilal Baloch, Partner at Shorooq, who is leading the fund, commented: “When we launched this fund, our vision was to connect world-class AI innovators with the capital, regulatory support, and market access that our region offers. To have invested in five highly promising companies, after assessing over 1000, outside our home market alongside leading peers in the US and Asia in 120 days is a marker toward that vision. We were most impressed that these founders are pushing the boundaries of what AI can do – from giving every app a voice interface to automating billion-dollar industries – and thereby allowing us to back varying theses across the AI stack. This is just the beginning; we believe the fund can be a bridge between East and West for AI, and we’re committed to accelerating more breakthroughs that will transform businesses and communities.”

Magzhan Kenesbai, Chief Growth Officer of Presight, commented: “AI only creates lasting value when it can operate within real systems. These first investments reflect that conviction – spanning secure AI infrastructure, vertical intelligence platforms for capital and industry, and edge-native systems. Each of these companies is building technology designed for integration into complex, regulated environments. Through this fund we are creating clear pathways from innovation to implementation – translating frontier AI into intelligent systems at scale.”

Portfolio Investments: Five Global AI Innovators Backed to Date

  1. NodeShift (Sovereign AI Cloud) — $1mm Seed round — Abu Dhabi, UAE
    NodeShit is building the first AI-native sovereign cloud platform designed to replace fragmented legacy infrastructure. Unlike mainstream cloud providers that struggle with data sovereignty and high costs, NodeShift consolidates virtualization, cloud management, and the AI stack into a single, unified Rust-based platform. This "true air-gap" system is specifically built for high-security clients in the GCC, central Asia, Europe and the US, removing foreign telemetry and dependencies to fulfill strict legal mandates for onshore data processing. By aggregating underutilized global capacity, NodeShift offers GPU workloads that are up to 65% cheaper than public clouds and significantly more efficient than legacy virtualization. The company was founded by Andrey Surkov and Mihai Mărcuță, a team of ex-Cisco, Microsoft, and Tesla engineers who bring deep domain expertise in networking and cloud architecture.
     
  2. Candid (Vertical AI for Engineering & Construction) — $6mm Seed round — San Francisco, USA Candid’s AI agent collapses the notoriously inefficient pre-construction bidding phase for EPCs (Engineering, Procurement, and Construction). While traditional manual bidding costs $1 million and takes 12 weeks per project, Candid reduces this preparation time by 10x, enabling firms to submit high-fidelity bids in just 1–2 weeks. By systematically ingesting 100% of project materials (PDFs, drawings, and specs), Candid eliminates the industry's reliance on manual reviews that typically only cover 10% of documentation. This automation reconciles inconsistencies and flags critical errors, tightening bid error margins from ±25% to a manageable ±10%. This precision prevents the wipeout of project margins and unlocks 2x revenue potential by allowing engineering teams to chase a higher volume of profitable bids. Talha Faiz and Hassan Azmat, both mechanical engineers turned entrepreneurs, co-founded Candid after working on some of Asia’s largest energy projects and pursuing AI research at Carnegie Mellon University.
     
  3. Hebbia (Vertical AI for Finance) — Undisclosed investment — New York, USA
    Hebbia is an enterprise-grade AI platform built to handle the world’s most complex knowledge work in finance, law, and government. Unlike standard chatbots that struggle with multi-step reasoning, Hebbia’s flagship interface, Matrix, acts as a collaborative AI agent that can ingest millions of pages of private data (regulatory filings, PDFs, VDRs) to perform end-to-end analysis. The platform’s critical differentiator is its proprietary Iterative Source Decomposition (ISD) architecture, which breaks down complex queries into logical sub-tasks and provides citation-backed verification for every answer—ensuring "ground truth" for firms where trust is paramount. Founded by George Sivulka at Stanford in 2020, Hebbia is “building the human layer – the product layer – to AI.”
     
  4. Blue (Voice AI / Edge AI) — $5.5mm Pre-Seed round — San Francisco, USA
    Blue is developing the first functional "Action Model" for mobile, designed to bypass the traditional limitations of app APIs. Unlike current reactive voice assistants (Siri, Google Assistant) that rely on developer-built integrations, Blue’s technology executes multi-step commands by directly simulating mouse and keyboard control over the user interface. This allows Blue to perform complex, hands-free tasks—such as reading and replying to messages, making payments, and managing files—inside any application. The platform's critical moat is "The Bud," a patent-pending USB-C hardware dongle that plugs into the phone to grant the Blue app direct control over the UI via Bluetooth. This hardware-software synergy allows for real-time, on-device LLM inference, ensuring that sensitive user data remains private and secure without relying on cloud processing. The company was co-founded by Omar Abdelaziz, Peter Krogh, and Farhan Hossain, who bring experience from Google Assistant, Google DeepMind, and Apple’s Vision Pro team.
     
  5. Crunched (Vertical AI for Finance) — $6mm Seed round — San Francisco, USA
    Crunched is an AI-powered Excel analyst designed for power users in consulting and investment finance. Crunched acts as an AI assistant inside spreadsheets – it can audit complex financial models for errors, pull data from the web or PDFs into templates, and even build analyses from scratch, cutting hours-long tasks down to minutes. In early use with consulting and private equity firms, users report productivity boosts over 2× in Excel work. “Crunched is the first AI Excel agent built by and for Excel power users,” tailored to management consulting and finance workflows. The company’s co-founders include Michael Sakowski, Lars G. Musæus, Markus Skagemo, and Philip Z. Borge, who collectively bring experience from McKinsey, banking, and enterprise AI development.

About the Presight–Shorooq Fund I
The Presight–Shorooq Fund I is a $100 million venture fund launched in partnership between Presight (G42’s AI and data analytics arm) and Shorooq in Abu Dhabi. The fund focuses on early-stage “AI-first” startups globally, investing in sectors such as fintech, smart cities, energy, industry 4.0, and deep tech. Portfolio companies benefit not only from capital but also from access to Presight’s AI infrastructure and G42’s ecosystem, as well as Shorooq’s track record in scaling startups. The fund exemplifies the UAE’s growing role as a hub for AI innovation and a conduit for connecting regional resources with global entrepreneurial talent. By backing visionary founders and co-investing with international partners, Presight–Shorooq Fund I aims to drive responsible AI growth on a global scale, from Abu Dhabi to the world.


About Shorooq
Founded in 2017, Shorooq is a multi-strategy investment firm engineered around technology. Our strategies span venture capital, credit, private equity, and real assets—each guided by a tech native lens that informs how we identify innovation, underwrite risk, and drive value. This integrated approach allows us to invest across the capital stack in businesses reshaping their sectors, from fintech and software to AI, industrials, and infrastructure.

Rooted in a founder-centric principle and disciplined underwriting, Shorooq blends global investment standards with true on-the-ground presence across the MENA and Asia. We are building an institution designed to endure, born in a region where the future of capital is being written.
Visit us at www.shorooq.com

Shorooq refers to a group of companies that are affiliates of each other and which operate under this business name, of which Shorooq Partners Ltd (regulated by the ADGM Financial Services Regulatory Authority FSRA FSP: 190004 as a category 3C Fund Manager) is a member.

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