Tech Revolt

The new confidential AI runtime uses NVIDIA Confidential Computing to let model providers and enterprises bring proprietary models and sensitive data together inside trusted infrastructure. [For more news, click here] Sensitive enterprise data is increasingly becoming a limiting factor in where advanced AI can be deployed.

QIA Launches Doha Investment Platform to Expand Qatar’s Private Sector The new investment platform will manage more than 40 companies and seek private and international investment in sectors Qatar sees as important to its next phase of growth.

Growing investment in AI across the Gulf is creating new demand for digital products, customer experiences and technology services. [For more news, click here] R/GA is formally establishing its MENA business in Abu Dhabi after more than a decade of working with organizations across the region. Bertrand Morin, who has led the company's regional work, has been appointed Executive Director, MENA, with more hiring planned and a dedicated office expected later this year.

Ayham Gorani is Co-Founder and CEO of Pemo, an all-in-one spend management platform built for SMEs. Born in Germany to Syrian parents, he is a computer scientist and entrepreneur who built and sold his first company before moving to the UAE in 2011. He co-founded Pemo in 2022. [For more news, click here] The UAE’s spend management space has quickly become one of the region’s most crowded fintech categories.

Web3 x AI Fusion will bring founders, developers and investors together in Singapore to examine practical applications of artificial intelligence and blockchain, from decentralized infrastructure to smart-contract automation and data ownership. [For more news, click here] Artificial intelligence and blockchain have developed largely along separate tracks, but the growing use of AI systems that can perform tasks on behalf of users is creating new areas of overlap.

At LEAP 2026 in Riyadh, Nadia Rinsky Head of GTM / Business Development, MENA at JetBrains spoke with Tech Revolt alongside Ruslan Kuleshov, a Site Reliability Engineer at JetBrains, about the Kingdom’s push to develop technical talent, strengthen AI governance, and bring greater accountability to the way developers use AI. [For more news, click here] JetBrains has spent more than two decades building tools used by software developers to write, understand, and maintain code.

The ECB is taking its balance sheet directly to the blockchain, launching a live settlement bridge to counter private stablecoins and tokenized deposits. [For more news, click here] The European Central Bank (ECB) has launched Pontes, a settlement system that connects traditional central bank payment infrastructure with blockchain-based financial markets. The move takes the project beyond experimental pilots and into the operating layer of institutional finance.

Abu Dhabi nature technology company Nabat has been named one of 10 winners of the World Economic Forum UpLink Scaling Land Restoration Challenge. Its AI platform, NabatOS, links ecosystem assessment, restoration, and monitoring so that projects are judged by what survives rather than what gets planted. The recognition comes as investors and governments look for restoration outcomes they can verify.

India’s biggest digital payments platform is starting its international expansion in a market where it already has a large potential customer base, but where the payments infrastructure is built differently. [For more news, click here] PhonePe has received in-principle approval from the Central Bank of the UAE for licences covering Retail Payment Services and Card Schemes and Stored Value Facilities, putting the company on a path towards establishing a locally regulated payments business.

The Riyadh-based fintech is building on its work with Saudi financial institutions as it prepares to enter other GCC markets. [For more news, click here] A larger share of Saudi Arabia's small-business financing is creating demand not only for more credit, but for better ways of handling it once an application reaches a lender.