The spotlight is shifting in the MENA tech scene, and female founders in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are commanding serious attention. For anyone tracking the regional startup surge, their ventures in Arabic AI, healthtech and enterprise automation are the clear ones to watch.
The data makes the case – women-only founded startups received 1.2% of VC funding in MENA in 2024, up from 0.47% in 2023. August 2025 broke the mould: two deals alone channelled $72.3 million to female-led ventures in a single month.
One was Gathern, a Saudi AI-powered vacation rental platform founded and led by Hala Aldosari, which raised $72 million in a round led by PIF’s Sanabil Investments, reaching a $266 million valuation. That makes Gathern the highest-valued venture-backed startup in MENA founded and led by a woman.
The other deal was Phys, a Saudi youth health platform co-founded by Zainab Alshaber, focused on gamified activity tracking for children. Different sector, same indicator – the trend is spreading.
The Founders Building It
Nour Taher is targeting a major blind spot in the global AI market. As CEO of intella, a Saudi-based company originally founded in Egypt, she’s leading the development of Arabic-first AI – speech-to-text, natural language processing and analytics that work across 25 Arabic dialects. The company raised a $12.5 million Series A in 2025, led by Prosus, bringing total funding to $16.9 million.
The company is now launching Ziila, an Arabic digital human designed for enterprise customer engagement. With Arabic-first AI wide open globally, Taher is the closest to dominating the sector.
In the UAE, CozmoX is showcasing a completely different type of AI venture worth watching. Co-founded by Nuha Hashem, the company builds AI employees capable of doing the work of 100 people: customer service, sales, debt collection, audits, invoice processing. Only five months into its launch by early 2025, CozmoX had onboarded more than 50 companies in the Emirates.
This rapid growth proves both the product’s value and market demand – the UAE’s regulatory infrastructure and AI-first national strategy have created conditions that compress the distance between launch and traction.
Over in Egypt, Dr. Rasha Rady and Dr. Doaa Aref have turned Chefaa into one of the most interesting female-led healthtech startups to watch – an AI-powered e-pharmacy platform with GPS-enabled services now operating across eight Saudi cities, having raised $5.25 million from Newtown Partners and Global Brain.
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What Changed To Make This Possible
Several changes aligned simultaneously to create this momentum. The UAE’s National AI Strategy 2031, Saudi Arabia’s PAISDA and the active involvement of both the UAE Ministry of AI and the Saudi Authority for Data and AI in backing women-led AI startups created a structural tailwind that has fundamentally changed what’s possible for founders in the region. Regulatory sandboxes, 100% foreign ownership rules and dedicated startup infrastructure have made the region considerably easier to build in than it was at the start of the decade.
Capital followed the strategy. AI startup funding in MENA rose 22% in 2025, with more than 60% directed to the UAE, and between 2022 and 2024 the region saw $660 million raised across 322 AI deals, with one in five VC deals in 2024 involving an AI company. Saudi Arabia led MENA VC in 2025 with $1.72 billion raised, up 145% year on year – that surge in capital helps serious startups secure funding, including female-founded ventures.
Dedicated programmes filled in the spaces that capital alone doesn’t cover. Google’s Women in AI Growth Academy, launched in 2024 as a partnership between Google for Startups, the Saudi Authority for Data and AI and the UAE Ministry of AI, offered an equity-free development programme to ten women-led MENA startups in its first cohort.
The programme is designed precisely to address the pre-seed and seed stage where women-led companies have historically been most disadvantaged.
What The Next Generation Can Expect
The upward trend is clear and unmistakable. Government strategy, international capital and dedicated programmes have created a foundation that simply didn’t exist five years ago, and the founders who moved early are now demonstrating what’s possible at large. Gathern, intella and CozmoX are the proof of concept that the next generation can point to.
Gathern’s $266 million valuation, intella’s Prosus-backed Series A and CozmoX’s rapid UAE adoption all demonstrate something that wasn’t demonstrable three years ago: women-led AI companies in MENA can reach serious scale with serious investors. Female entrepreneurs in the region are projected to double by 2030. The infrastructure – government strategy, VC investment, dedicated programmes – is more developed than it’s ever been.
The opportunity that remains most open is also the most distinctive: Arabic-first AI. Global models still underperform significantly on Arabic language tasks. The founders who build locally grounded, culturally specific AI tools for a 400 million-person Arabic-speaking market have a true first-mover advantage that no Silicon Valley lab can replicate from a distance.
Rather than a niche market, this represents one of the most underexplored segments in global AI development. Currently, women like Nour Taher are best positioned to capture it.
