Startup Qatar Showcase

Innovating the Future: Qatar’s Startups Drive Global Transformation in Logistics, Agri-Tech, Energy, AI, Payments, and Gaming

The Startup Qatar Showcase at Web Summit highlighted innovative companies addressing global challenges. Mr. Khalifa Al-Thani, Co-founder and CEO of Wareone LLC, detailed the inefficiencies in GCC logistics, where traditional operations and limited digitalization lead to high costs and poor customer experiences. Wareone, Qatar’s first digital on-demand logistics platform, acts as an “Airbnb for warehousing,” offering flexible, usage-based storage and integrating fulfillment and transportation into a single, tech-enabled system. This allows real-time management and tracking, transforming logistics. In 11 months, Wareone has expanded to over 25 partners and 40+ customers across the GCC.

Mr. Davide Fabris, Co-Founder and Commercial Director of Growa.ai, addressed Qatar’s 80% food import dependency, identifying it as a critical resource management issue. Governments struggle with fragmented data and a lack of real-time national visibility. Growa.ai provides a national food intelligence infrastructure, combining AI, blockchain, IoT, and satellite data. Their dashboard empowers governments to analyze data, receive targeted suggestions, and automate decisions at a national scale, optimizing resource utilization and enhancing food security in arid countries.

Mr. Sean Park, Founder and CEO of EnergyX, presented his deep technology for energy optimization in buildings. He noted that current sustainability efforts are often costly and compromise architectural design. EnergyX’s solution makes sustainability profitable and design-resilient through EnergyX Zero (AI/software for efficiency) and EnergyX Systems (manufacturing energy-generating building envelopes). Mr. Park showcased the world’s first certified Plus-Energy Building, which produces 130% of its energy needs, demonstrating a scalable and profitable model. EnergyX plans to establish its global HQ and R&D center in Qatar by 2026.

Ms. Nour Al Hassan, CEO of Arabic AI, discussed her company’s mission to build sovereign AI for the Arabic language. She highlighted that Arabic, despite 420 million speakers, constitutes only 4% of internet content, leading to a scarcity of high-quality data for AI models and challenges for data sovereignty. Arabic AI has developed a fine-tuned large language model that leads the Helm Stanford leaderboard for Arabic. Their agentic platform creates customized AI agents for enterprises, focusing on data quality and integration, ensuring culturally localized, secure AI solutions.

Mr. Juan Pablo Ortega, Co-Founder and CEO of Yuno, tackled the complexities of global payments, citing high transaction decline rates and outdated infrastructure that cause significant revenue loss. Yuno provides a single operating system for global payments, orchestrating various methods, KYC/KYB, and pay-ins/payouts for merchants, PSPs, and banks. Yuno’s modular platform aims to make payments effortless, supporting expansion and increasing approval rates. It also prepares businesses for “Agentic Commerce,” where AI agents will conduct purchases. With operations in 33+ countries, Yuno has chosen Qatar as its strategic hub for the Middle East.

Finally, Ms. Mariam Nusrat, Founder and CEO of Breshna.io, introduced her no-code platform designed to democratize video game creation. Recognizing that few of the 3.3 billion global players make games due to cost and skill barriers, Breshna.io enables rapid, low-cost development of bite-sized, multilingual games using AI and drag-and-drop tools. Breshna.io extends game utility beyond entertainment to education, social impact, and marketing, acting as a “Canva for purposeful games.” The platform boasts 180,000 game makers and 2.5 million gameplays, having secured $2.9 million in funding, including from Qatar Development Bank. Ms. Nusrat emphasized Breshna.io’s alignment with Qatar’s National Vision 2030, aiming to build a global content creation platform from the Gulf.