UAE based startup Mastiska has secured a USD 10 million seed funding round, primarily backed by sovereign wealth funds from Gulf Cooperation Council countries, in a bid to accelerate the development of data centre class inference accelerators and establish a fabless semiconductor company with regional control over AI hardware.
Founded in 2024 by CEO Suresh Sugumar, Mastiska combines a model creation team in Abu Dhabi with a VLSI engineering unit in India, aiming to produce what it calls “sovereign silicon”, AI specialized hardware governed locally to provide emerging markets an alternative to U.S. and Chinese chip suppliers.
Mastiska plans to initially release custom PCIe cards based on FPGA platforms, leveraging Agilex 7M architectures enhanced with up to 96 GB of high bandwidth memory, significantly exceeding the 32 GB standard on comparable FPGA solutions. The company says these accelerators are production-ready and designed for deployment in real data-center environments, rather than serving as experimental prototypes.
Looking further ahead, Mastiska intends to tape out its own RISC-V-based ASIC with a neuromorphic inspired architecture optimized for parallel computation and energy efficiency. Alongside hardware, the Abu Dhabi team is developing brain-inspired AI models, including modified transformer architectures, to tightly integrate software and hardware for improved inference performance.
Unlike startups such as Graphcore or SambaNova Systems, which have aimed to compete directly with GPUs in the global market, Mastiska positions itself as a provider of sovereign AI compute for the GCC, South Asia, BRICS nations, and other Global South regions. The company emphasizes transparency and auditability, allowing governments and institutions to fully inspect chip designs to ensure cybersecurity compliance.
The $10 million funding round gives Mastiska the runway to deploy its FPGA-based accelerators while progressing toward long term ASIC designs, aiming to carve out a niche where regional demand for autonomy and security outweighs the need for raw processing performance. Sugumar has described the company’s strategic approach as operating in “a blue ocean where no matter what happens in the U.S. or China it won’t impact me to the extent I should be worried about competition.”
If Mastiska executes its roadmap successfully, it could provide emerging economies in the Middle East, South Asia, and the wider Global South with a locally governed AI infrastructure, potentially reshaping supply chains for AI hardware and offering a new model for technological sovereignty.
Mastiska Secures $10M to build UAE’s first sovereign AI Chips