Think closes MENA's largest AI infrastructure pre-seed round

A Riyadh startup barely a year old has just raised more money at pre-seed than most regional companies see at Series A, and it did so by selling the least fashionable thing in artificial intelligence, which is the hardware underneath it. Think has closed a pre-seed round of more than 8 million dollars, billed as the largest AI infrastructure and deeptech round of its kind in the Middle East and North Africa to date. The round was co-led by two Saudi funds, RAED Ventures and Wa'ed Ventures, the latter wholly owned by Aramco, with the venture arm of Dhahran Techno Valley and a group of strategic angels joining in. What Think sells is a rejection of the rented cloud. Founded in 2025 by Ahmed AlSharif, a games industry veteran with time at PlayStation, EA and Meta, and Ammar Enaya, formerly of Cisco and HPE, the company builds an integrated platform pairing its own liquid-cooled hardware with orchestration software to squeeze far more out of expensive GPUs. Its lineup runs to three products, an AI SuperNode unit the company says delivers 135 per cent higher compute density than conventional kit, the Intelligent Lifecycle Manager software that dynamically distributes workloads, and Constellation, which stitches idle desktop computers into high-performance clusters outside working hours. Think claims GPU utilization above 90 per cent in production against an industry average nearer half, and pitches a return on investment inside a year of ownership rather than perpetual fees to a hyperscaler. That argument is the whole business, and Enaya put it plainly, saying customers want the benefits of AI without the spiraling costs, security worries and dependence that come bundled with hyperscale cloud providers, and that demand is coming from enterprises, startups and government bodies alike. RAED's general partner Wael Nafee framed the thesis more broadly, arguing the next generation of AI leaders will be defined not just by the models they build but by the infrastructure that makes AI practical, affordable and sovereign. The money will fund team growth, manufacturing scale-up and product development across Saudi Arabia, the GCC and selected international markets over the next 18 months, with the ILM software eventually spun out to stand alone. The regional logic explains why Saudi money moved so quickly. Sovereignty has become the organizing principle of Gulf technology policy, with the Kingdom pouring billions into compute through the PIF-backed HUMAIN, an ecosystem Think is already partnered with, while the UAE pursues parallel ambitions via G42. Rising GPU costs, tightening data residency rules and unease about depending on foreign clouds have created exactly the gap Think is targeting, offering organizations infrastructure they own outright. That Aramco's venture arm is co-leading a deeptech round in Riyadh, rather than another fintech, says something about where Saudi Arabia now wants its capital to go.