The $100 million Presight–Shorooq AI Fund has backed five frontier artificial intelligence companies in its first quarter, underscoring rising institutional capital flows into advanced AI infrastructure and applications across global markets.
The $100 million Presight–Shorooq AI Fund has announced the first wave of investments from its maiden quarter, backing five frontier artificial intelligence companies, a milestone in early stage AI funding that reflects deepening institutional capital flows into advanced AI infrastructure and application layers. Launched in September 2025, the fund is a joint initiative between Abu Dhabi headquartered AI and analytics firm Presight and regional investment firm Shorooq Partners, with the mandate to bridge world class AI innovation with UAE sovereign infrastructure and global markets.
In its first quarter of operations, the fund has backed five AI startups NodeShift, Candid, Hebbia, Blue, and Crunched led by founders with backgrounds at DeepMind, Google X, Meta, and Stanford, according to a press release detailing the portfolio deployment. These companies span foundational AI infrastructure to domain specific intelligence platforms, illustrating the diversified thesis of the Presight–Shorooq vehicle.
NodeShift, based in Abu Dhabi, received a $1 million seed investment to build an AI native sovereign cloud platform designed to consolidate virtualization, cloud management, and the AI stack into a unified system. The company was founded by Andrey Surkov and Mihai Mărcuță, engineers with experience at Cisco, Microsoft, and Tesla, and aims to address data sovereignty and cost challenges for high security clients in the GCC, Europe, and U.S. markets.
Candid, headquartered in San Francisco with a $6 million seed round, is developing vertical AI tools for the engineering and construction sector to automate and collapse pre construction bidding workflows. Co founders Talha Faiz and Hassan Azmat, both mechanical engineers and AI researchers previously involved in large energy infrastructure projects, have built an agentic system that ingests full project documentation to dramatically shorten bid preparation time and reduce error margins.
In New York, Hebbia has secured investment to advance its enterprise AI platform designed for complex knowledge work in finance, law, and government, notably through its proprietary Matrix interface that can ingest extensive private data while providing citation backed reasoning. Founded by George Sivulka out of Stanford, Hebbia emphasizes rigorous interpretability and enterprise grade collaboration.
Blue, a voice and edge AI platform based in San Francisco, raised approximately $5.5 million in a pre seed round to develop the first functional “Action Model” for mobile devices that bypasses traditional app APIs. Co-founders Omar Abdelaziz, Peter Krogh, and Farhan Hossain, who previously worked on projects including Google Assistant and Apple Vision Pro, are building hands free interaction tools with real time on device LLM inference that preserves user privacy.
Finally, Crunched, also based in San Francisco with a $6 million seed round, is an AI powered Excel assistant tailored for consulting and investment finance. Its AI agent audits complex financial models, pulls external data into spreadsheet templates, and generates analysis, a tool the company’s co founders Michael Sakowski, Lars G. Musæus, Markus Skagemo, and Philip Z. Borge describe as built “by and for Excel power users.
Across these investments, the fund has co invested alongside top-tier global venture firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Google Ventures (GV), Quiet Capital, First Round Capital, and Y Combinator, as well as renowned angel investors including Yann LeCun, Paul Graham, and Peter Thiel, signaling broad institutional confidence in the portfolio companies’ founders and technologies.
The Presight–Shorooq AI Fund’s deployment in five companies during its first quarter underscores growing interest in AI solutions that extend from sovereign compute infrastructure to specialized vertical intelligence at a time when global AI funding remains a significant portion of overall venture capital activity despite broader technology market volatility. The fund’s strategic alignment with Presight’s AI infrastructure and Shorooq’s investment network aims to create synergies between capital access, enterprise distribution, and regional market expansion for these frontier innovators.
