By Manny Larcher 

Dubai-based AI startup Ayan has raised Dh2.2 million (about $599,000) in pre-seed funding from what the company describes as strategic global business angels, betting that the next fight for customer loyalty will be won or lost inside AI assistants. The company said the capital will fund expansion beyond the Middle East and North Africa.

Hearing What AI Says About Your Brand

Ayan pitches itself as "front office intelligence" for an era of AI-led buying. Shoppers increasingly ask chatbots and AI assistants which product to buy before they ever reach a store or a brand's website, and those answers are shaped by data the brand rarely sees. Ayan's agentic platform analyses how AI tools describe a brand, compares that picture against the brand's intended positioning, and then acts on the gaps across sales channels.

The loop doesn't stop there. The platform measures how its interventions shift subsequent AI answers, and it feeds the questions customers ask at the sales counter back into the next round of fixes. Ayan says it has analyzed millions of data points on how AI describes brands and already serves more than 50 brands across MENA, Europe and North America.

"There's a version of your brand you've never read. It's the only one your customers meet," said founder and CEO Pablo Charron. "And it's already deciding who gets recommended, without you in the room."

The Sales Floor, Rewired

Co-founder and Chief Growth Officer Chakir El Messaoudi frames the shift around frontline staff, who now meet customers already briefed by a machine. "The advisor used to be the first expert a customer met. Now they are the second," he said. "Our job is to make sure they are the better-informed one."

Alongside the raise, Ayan added enterprise software heavyweights to its bench. Vincent Carvalho, Chief Growth Officer of the M&A Group at IFS and its former President for Asia-Pacific, Japan, Middle East and Africa, joins as a founding board member. "Brands everywhere are losing the first conversation with their customers to AI, and most cannot even hear it," Carvalho said.

Christian Pedersen, Group CEO of Cegid and a former chief product officer at IFS and SAP, joins as an adviser. "Front office systems were built for a customer who talks to the brand first," he said, pointing to the gap Ayan is built to close.

Riding the UAE's AI Wave

The round lands as capital floods into regional AI. According to MAGNiTT, AI and AI-enabled companies in MENA raised $678 million in the first half of 2026, up 81% year on year, with the UAE accounting for 93% of that total. Policy is pushing in the same direction: in April, the UAE Cabinet approved a plan to run half of government services on agentic AI within two years under the National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence 2031.

Ayan sits in a fast-forming category sometimes called generative engine optimization, where brands try to influence how large language models talk about them, as they once chased Google rankings. Ayan's angle is to move beyond visibility dashboards and connect AI perception to what happens on the shop floor.

The company did not name individual investors or disclose its valuation. With a customer base already spanning three continents, the pre-seed check aims to take the product beyond its home region.

Source

Zawya — "UAE start-up Ayan raises Dh2.2mln as AI assistants reshape how consumers choose brands"