Tejas Ravishankar

🚀 MEVP is excited to back AppliedAI in their $55M oversubscribed Series A, alongside G42, Bessemer Venture Partners, and e&. AppliedAI, now based in Abu Dhabi, is behind Opus, an AI-powered automation platform built for highly regulated industries like financial services, healthcare, and government. Their enterprise-grade solutions are driving real digital transformation across the region. We’re proud to support their global expansion and product growth as they help shape MENA’s AI future. More here: https://lnkd.in/dixFxEns Walid Mansour Arya H. Bolurfrushan #MEVP #AppliedAI #SeriesA #EnterpriseAI #MENA #AITransformation #VentureCapital

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1001 AI is a deep-tech startup with offices in London and Dubai, founded by Bilal Abu-Ghazaleh. The company has raised $9 million in a seed funding round. The funding was led by CIV, General Catalyst, and Lux Capital, with support from investors including Chris Ré, Amjad Masad (Replit), Amira Sajwani (DAMAC), Khalid Bin Bader Al Saud (RAED Ventures), and Hisham Al-Falih (Lean Technologies). 🔗 Read full article link in comment #1001AI #deeptech #startupnews #funding #businessupdate #businessnews

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Want a Shot at $140,000? DMCC (Dubai Multi Commodities Centre) and Bybit Just Launched Their Biggest Web3 Hackathon 💥 Big news for builders, devs, and Web3 innovators: DMCC and global crypto exchange have officially opened applications for the third edition of their Web3 hackathon — and this year, it’s bigger than ever. 💰 $140,000 prize pool 🔥 New themes added: #DeFAI and #DeSci 🌐 Still focused on the hottest areas: #DeFi, #Web3, and beyond 🚀 Applications are now open. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/d6mGuMxR

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UAE's Middle East Venture Partners (MEVP) has joined AppliedAI's $55 million Series A round, along with G42, Bessemer Venture Partners, and strategic partner e&. The round was oversubscribed. Founded in 2021 in the UK by Arya H. Bolurfrushan and relocated to the UAE in 2022, AppliedAI leverages AI to process medical billing records and insurance claims faster and more accurately than traditional outsourcing firms. The new funding will support AppliedAI’s international expansion, enhance product capabilities, and deepen its presence in the MENA region, where the company is building partnerships within the UAE’s AI ecosystem. https://lnkd.in/de62iVFu

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For the third year in a row, DMCC and Bybit are bringing Dubai’s largest Web3 hackathon to life. This year, Web3 Unleashed returns with a prize pool of USDT 140,000 and two new tracks in DeFAI and DeSci, reflecting the latest developments in decentralised technology. Applications open from 1 September to 5 October 2025 through: https://lnkd.in/gCKkn5hP #Hackathon #DMCCCryptoCentre #Web3

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Having spent hundreds of hours working alongside Claude Code since the new year, I can confidently say we have reached a "red alert" moment for software incumbents. For the last two decades, the sheer complexity and cost of writing code served as a formidable structural moat. If you had the capital to deploy a massive engineering team, you had a defensible market position. That era is rapidly closing. Advanced AI agents are turning code execution into a commodity. When the marginal cost of producing functional software drops toward zero, massive engineering departments built around the traditional SDLC transition from being a competitive advantage to a bureaucratic liability. We are entering an era of deep asymmetric competition. A lean team who know what they want, armed with Claude Code, can now exceed the output of traditional incumbents, but with greater agility and zero legacy technical debt. If your business model captures the majority of its value from software, your moat is evaporating. Value capture in tech is violently shifting. It is no longer about the capacity to write code; it is about proprietary data, distribution networks, ideas and knowing what problems to solve. The incumbents aren't inherently doomed, but those who fail to recognize that the fundamental economics of software have changed will be replaced by those who do.

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💭Thinking of launching your crypto startup in the UAE? 💡Vineet Budki, CEO and Managing Partner of Sigma Capital, shares his advice for founders entering one of the world’s most dynamic digital asset markets. 🎬 Watch the full episode now on YouTube: https://lnkd.in/d-gpf43e 🎟 And subscribe to the SandDunes by Entrepreneur Middle East playlist for more unfiltered conversations. 🎤Hosted by: Tamara Pupic, Managing Editor, Entrepreneur Middle East #SandDunesPodcast #EntrepreneurMiddleEast #VineetBudki #SigmaCapital #VentureCapital #StartupFunding #DigitalAssets

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🚀 Exploring Cairo: The Language Powering the Future of Scalable Blockchain Apps 🧠💥 As a blockchain developer deeply passionate about innovation and scalability, I’ve started diving into Cairo, the programming language behind StarkNet, a leading ZK-rollup solution for Ethereum. 🔍 What makes Cairo exciting? 1. Designed for Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) 2. Enables massive scalability while inheriting Ethereum’s security 3. Built with performance and provability in mind Whether you’re building dApps, working on smart contracts, or just exploring the frontier of blockchain tech Cairo is worth learning. 🛠️ I’m currently getting hands-on with Cairo and exploring how to build efficient and secure smart contracts on StarkNet. If you're also learning or building with Cairo, let’s connect and share resources and experiences! 🤝 #Blockchain #StarkNet #CairoLang #Web3 #ZKRollup #Ethereum #SmartContracts #DeveloperJourney #Cairo #ZeroKnowledgeProofs

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Building Correcto to 100k+ users and a $7M Seed round came down to two core principles. I haven’t shared these publicly until now. If you're looking to build a company in 2026, I believe these 2 areas matter most: 1. Your Unfair Advantage  It is important to go through an element of self-reflection and understand where you are "different and better" than anyone else. Let’s say you have been working 20 years in paid advertising; that level of familiarity gives you an unfair advantage that an outsider can't buy. This doesn’t necessarily have to be where you work. Sometimes your edge comes from living inside a specific pain. For example, you worked in a luxury hotel group and spent years watching how bad internal scheduling destroys margins and staff morale. Your unfair advantage is operational flow optimisation in service businesses. You need to identify that specific layer of excellence where you have a better understanding than the public you are starting to build for. 2. Your Passion  Everyone says it, but it’s true: the only thing that sustains that level of intensity over time is genuine obsession. You have to be deeply in love with the problem. Passion is what carried me through long hours, hard seasons, and years of saying no to great opportunities and experiences. Whether you’re building a venture-backed machine or a bootstrapped business, if you aren't obsessed with the problem, you won't survive the pressure of time.

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This was our pitch at the BNB Hackathon in Abu Dhabi, that won USD 2000 in credits, under DeFi category. Our thought process was simple. Today, farmers in the Global South are paying anywhere between 24% to 36% in interest for Agri Financing, where as approx. 250B stablecoins are lying idle in wallets without generating any yield. In order to reduce interest from 24% to 8%, stabecoin holders can stake their stablecoins and earn 6% yield, whereas farmers only pay 8% (the 2% arbitrage covers crop insurance, gas fees and reserves). Hope you find this useful. We call it #borderless banking for the #unbanked

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UAE's new financial law brings DeFi and Web3 under regulatory scope. "We're just code is no longer a defence”, and I’m not sure I agree.🤔 There does need to be a solution to govern Defi, but I don’t think a traditional license is necessarily the right solution. Federal Decree Law No. 6 gives the central bank authority over any protocol or platform enabling payments, exchange, lending, or custody. 🔍 Licenses required by September 2026, penalties up to $272 million. Decentralization isn't an exemption anymore.🌐 The UAE positioned itself as a crypto haven while other jurisdictions cracked down. Now they're doing the same thing, just later.⌚ This will push projects out. When you tell builders they need expensive licenses and face quarter-billion dollar fines for non-compliance, they relocate to friendlier jurisdictions.🌍   The law doesn't ban self-custody, but it creates enough regulatory burden on companies that the ecosystem will shrink. Dubai attracted talent by being open. This reverses that advantage.🔁 Watch capital and projects migrate elsewhere.

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Setting up a fintech in the UAE can make you feel like a headless chicken. Or worse.. a headless suit. "so who actually regulates my fintech business?" It’s one of the most common (and loaded) questions we get from fintech founders setting up or expanding into the UAE. Because here's the thing: 👉🏼 The financial ecosystem in the UAE isn't regulated under a single jurisdiction. This bifurcation creates a messy landscape, with businesses often leaking outside the confines of a regulatory boundary. For founders, these mistakes end up causing outsized consequences. Lost time. Frozen funds. Broken momentum. Fixing the wrong setup later is often harder than starting over. -- Last week, a UK based fintech founder building a cross-border payments platform reached out to us. They assumed there was one central regulator, like the FCA back home. But the landscape here is fragmented. And where you land shapes everything. 💡 Here’s a quick breakdown of the major players:  🔷 Central Bank of the UAE (CBUAE) – Regulates banks, lenders, payment providers, insurers, and fintechs looking to operate in the UAE market and deal in the local currency.  🔷 Securities and Commodities Authority (SCA) – Oversees securities trading and public capital markets  🔷 Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA) – Governs financial entities inside the DIFC (Dubai’s financial free zone)   🔷 Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA) – Handles the same for ADGM (Abu Dhabi’s financial free zone) Each operates under a different legal framework - with the onshore regulators using UAE federal civil law, and the free zone regulators using common law. So what does this mean for founders? Licensing depends on your jurisdiction, activity, and structure. Here’s how it typically plays out: 📌 If you want to offer credit, payments, or custody services onshore, you need a license from the Central Bank 📌 If you’re launching a securities platform, SCA will be your regulator 📌 If you’re an asset manager or investment firm based in DIFC or ADGM, you’ll need to engage with DFSA or FSRA respectively Even cross-border players aren’t exempt: 🎯 You can’t underwrite UAE-based insurance risks from abroad 🎯 You can’t market foreign funds here unless you’re working through a local licensed agent 🎯 And you definitely can’t serve retail users in Dubai from a free zone entity If you're expanding with a clear product and market fit, it’s simple: pick the regulator that fits your model and go deep. If you're an early-stage founder still finding your market, it’s trickier. You risk leaking across regulatory boundaries as you are prone to pivots. This means more friction, more negotiation and sharper go-to-market strategy. In a fragmented system like the UAE, clarity on your business model isn't just good strategy. It's survival. [artwork by: justatef_ on instagram]

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Classera has announced a new global edtech joint venture that brings together its venture builder arm, C.XSEED Ventures, with SuperCharger Ventures and Saudi-based Falak Group. Unveiled at Bett London 2026, the alliance aims to systematically build and scale edtech startups in emerging markets, drawing on Classera’s footprint across more than 45 countries. The initiative is led by Classera founder and CEO Mohammad S. Almadani and co‑founder Mohammad Alashmawi, alongside SuperCharger Ventures co‑founder Yanos Barberis and Falak Group founder Adwa AlDakheel. ✅ A jointly run “startup factory” selecting new edtech cohorts every six months, with hands‑on support from early venture building to international expansion ✅ Access to Classera’s global education network, combined with SuperCharger Ventures’ accelerator model and investor reach ✅ Venture development and fund structuring expertise from Falak Group, rooted in Saudi Arabia with a clear outward, global focus ✅ A stated emphasis on founders in emerging markets who face scale and access constraints rather than idea shortages ✅ Backing aligned with broader ecosystem ambitions, including C.XSEED, LearnGlobe and EduMall #EdTech #VentureCapital #EmergingMarkets #EducationInnovation

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