TiE Dubai has named five regional winners of the seventh edition of its TiE Women MENA program, selecting women-led startups across Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the wider Middle East and an Emirati-focused track.

Following virtual regional finals held from September 8 to 17, Naglaa Mohamed, Co-Founder of Egypt-based P-Vita; Lea Mehaweg, Co-Founder and CEO of Saudi Arabia-based Maison Safqa; and Anuscha Iqbal, Co-Founder and CEO of UAE-based Qanooni AI, won their respective country tracks. Rowan Alawi, CEO of Trase, took the Rest of MENA category, while Aisha Alyassi, Founder and Brand Director of SCULP, won the Emirati track.

The five founders will compete for the MENA title at the program’s finals during GITEX Global 2026 in December.

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More Than 250 Women-Founded Businesses Apply

TiE Women MENA attracted more than 250 licensed, women-founded businesses this year, up from almost 200 applications in 2025. The cohort spanned sectors including AI and SaaS, AgriTech and FoodTech, HealthTech, sustainability and fashion.

Of the applicants, 228 founders were shortlisted and 46 advanced to the regional finals. Each track selected one winner and two runners-up based on criteria including product-market fit, go-to-market strategy, team strength, competitive advantage, financial objectives and operational and technical viability.

Finalists also worked with dedicated mentors to refine their pitches and prepare their businesses for the regional competition.

The 2026 cohort reflected a strong focus on AI, with founders applying the technology to legal services, construction, livestock health, prenatal care and community platforms. Sustainability-focused companies included ventures addressing agricultural waste, textile reuse and water conservation, while several startups developed products around women’s mobility, mental wellbeing and maternal health.

Winners Head to GITEX Global 2026

At Expand North Star during GITEX Global 2026, each regional winner will receive a dedicated pod to showcase their business and connect with investors and other ecosystem stakeholders.

The five founders will continue receiving one-to-one mentorship ahead of the December final, with support focused on their pitches, go-to-market strategies and investor materials.

Carlina Marani and Shameema Parveen, Co-Chairs of TiE Women MENA 2026, said this year’s candidates stood out for both the quality of their pitches and the range of industries represented. They highlighted businesses spanning AI-powered water conservation and fetal health to sustainability and Emirati food products.

Aisha Alyassi described winning the Emirati track as an important milestone for SCULP, saying the program had encouraged her to expand her ambitions, refine the company’s vision and connect with other women founders.

Addressing MENA’s Female Funding Gap

The program comes as women-founded startups continue to receive a small share of venture funding across the region. According to figures provided by TiE Dubai, female-founded startups secured just $2.5 million in the first half of 2026, representing 0.14% of the region’s $1.7 billion in venture funding.

TiE Dubai said its program aims to narrow that gap through mentorship, funding access, visibility and regional networking.

Over the past four years, TiE Women MENA has supported more than 1,000 women-led businesses, curated over 350 pitches and awarded AED 380,000 in equity-free prize money. Globally, TiE Women has received more than 11,000 applications across 62 countries and accelerated over 500 women-led startups.

The MENA program is run by TiE Dubai and powered by Nokia, alongside partners TECOM, Dubai Internet City and in5 Innovation Centers.

Ai Everything Abu Dhabi 2026 will bring more than 150 AI startups to the UAE capital on October 6 and 7, showcasing technologies spanning enterprise software, industrial safety, customer experience and sovereign AI.

Held at the ADNEC Centre, the event will bring together more than 400 global technology companies and startups. Its Ai StartX Everything showcase will connect founders with more than 200 investors from 30 countries representing $100 billion in assets under management.

Among the companies exhibiting are startups from Portugal, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the US, with products focused on moving AI deeper into enterprise operations.

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Enterprise AI Moves Into Critical Workflows

Portuguese AI-native software assurance company VisionHammer will showcase technology designed to diagnose and resolve problems within enterprise software while retaining human oversight.

Its platform can identify the root cause of an incident, generate and test a fix, and submit a pull request for approval. In one production deployment, VisionHammer said it reduced average incident resolution time from around five hours to four minutes.

The company will present CodeScan, which analyses code security with every release, and Assessment, a system for mapping and diagnosing enterprise software environments. Co-founder and COO Tiago Silva said demand is increasingly centred on AI that can operate reliably in critical systems while maintaining human control and auditability.

Singapore-headquartered Ailytics, meanwhile, will demonstrate AilyssaX, a vision-language-model-powered platform that converts existing CCTV networks into real-time industrial safety and operational intelligence.

Ailytics said it has completed more than 400 deployments across over 15 countries, with customers including Changi Airport Group, DHL, Laing O’Rourke and Obayashi. Following its recent Series A round, the company is expanding into the Middle East.

Gulf Startups Showcase Arabic and Sovereign AI

Saudi-based Lucidya will showcase its AI Agent and provide an early look at Agentic Workflows designed to automate customer journeys across enterprise systems.

The company said its Agentic CX Platform supports 17 Arabic dialects with more than 92% accuracy and uses billions of data points to interpret customer and market signals. Lucidya is also ISO/IEC 42001 certified and compliant with PDPL, GDPR and SOC 2.

Dubai-registered MetisJean will launch Jean 1001, its sovereign operating system for enterprise AI. The platform runs within a customer’s own infrastructure, makes its reasoning traceable to source material and records actions on an immutable, audit-ready ledger.

MetisJean said Jean can reduce token consumption by up to 90% in some applications. Founder and CEO Alexander Haywood said the company intends to build sovereign enterprise AI in the Gulf before taking the technology to international markets.

US-based Newrunio will also introduce Personal Super-Intelligence (PAI) 1.2 globally for the first time. The screen-aware floating AI agent operates within a user’s existing digital environment, providing contextual suggestions and executing tasks without requiring users to continually switch between applications.

Connecting AI Founders With Global Capital

Beyond product demonstrations, Ai StartX Everything will connect startups with investors, sovereign funds, enterprise buyers and technology companies through its Investor Programme.

The programme includes the Supernova AI Global Pitch Competition, where five finalists will pitch to investors and industry leaders for equity-free prizes.

Organised by inD, with Abu Dhabi’s Department of Government Enablement as Host Partner and Mubadala company Solutions+ as Global Partner, Ai Everything Abu Dhabi will also feature ATRC, First Abu Dhabi Bank and Hub71 alongside global technology companies including AWS, Alibaba Cloud, Microsoft, Mistral AI and ASUS.

Scooter, an Indian sales hiring startup, has raised ₹1.5 crore (US$0.16 million) in a pre-seed funding round led by AJVC, the early-stage venture capital fund founded by Aviral Bhatnagar.

The Pune-based company plans to use the fresh capital to strengthen its product and simplify sales hiring for startups and job seekers. The deal marks AJVC’s first investment in a Pune-based startup.

Scooter did not disclose its valuation or the total amount of capital it has raised to date.

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Moving Sales Hiring Beyond Resumes

Founded in 2024 by Kartik Mandrekar and Saumya Seth, Scooter is building a hiring platform focused specifically on sales roles. Rather than relying primarily on resumes and conventional screening, the startup assesses candidates through exercises designed around the requirements of individual sales positions.

The platform sources verified sales candidates and evaluates them before presenting employers with a shortlist of three to five applicants. Hiring managers can also review video clips from candidate assessments before examining their resumes.

Scooter’s approach is built around assessing how candidates perform in sales-related scenarios earlier in the recruitment process, giving employers another layer of information before committing time to interviews.

The model primarily targets startups and sales teams looking to evaluate practical selling skills while reducing the time required to screen large pools of applicants.

Pre-Seed Funding to Strengthen the Platform

Scooter will use the AJVC-led financing to expand its product and improve the hiring experience for both candidates and employers.

The company is working to refine how sales professionals are assessed and matched with potential employers, particularly startups that need to build or expand sales teams.

Its platform brings candidate sourcing, assessments and shortlisting into a single process. By providing employers with a smaller pool of evaluated candidates, Scooter aims to reduce some of the manual screening typically involved in sales recruitment.

The startup has not disclosed additional investors in the pre-seed round.

Building a Network of Sales Candidates

Scooter said it currently works with more than 50 companies and has added 14 new clients in recent months. Its candidate network has also grown to more than 10,000 sales professionals.

The company said one client completed a sales hire through the platform in six days. The business and performance figures were provided by Scooter and have not been independently verified.

The founders bring backgrounds spanning sales, hiring and science. Mandrekar previously led sales teams at Gartner, Shoptimize and Graas, giving him experience in both sales operations and recruitment. Seth is a scientist and holds a master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

A Skills-First Model for Sales Recruitment

Scooter is betting that sales recruitment can benefit from putting practical assessments earlier in the hiring process rather than using resumes as the primary filter.

Its platform is designed to evaluate candidates against role-specific requirements and give hiring managers access to assessment results before they move deeper into the recruitment process.

With its first institutional capital from the AJVC-led pre-seed round, Scooter will now focus on developing its product, expanding its network and improving how startups identify and evaluate sales talent.