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Dubai-Based Startup Alfii Raises $2.5 Million In Seed Funding
The significant investment will be used to build new engineering solutions for the company’s FinTech-powered human resource automation platform.
After launching in November 2022, Dubai-based startup Alfii has raised $2.5 million in pre-seed funding as the company seeks to expand its team and develop its product offering.
Alfii is a cloud-based HR automation platform where users can set up a company profile, invite employees, and begin managing documents, employee data, payroll, and more.
The latest funding round was overseen by US-based venture capital company Preface Ventures, as well as Dubai-based Aditum Ventures, Kayan Ventures, and Wayfinders.
“With Alfii’s all-in-one software suite, companies will be able to better understand and manage their human capital resources while improving the user experience for employees with features like digital-to-cash remittances, benefits selection,” says Farooq Abbasi, general partner of Preface Ventures.
With funding now secured, Alfii plans to build a suite of payroll features to provide users with “smarter, faster ways to manage payroll and salary disbursements, drastically simplifying a process that is typically tedious and time-consuming for HR owners,” the company explained.
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“We are looking to build the next generation of this product class, and we are building it entirely in-house – which means we need to bring on world-class talent to grow our business and better serve our customers,” added Yousef Albarqawi, Alfii co-founder and chief executive.
The tech startup plans to gradually introduce a whole suite of new features for HR processes, including onboarding, time-tracking, and leave management. Eventually, the Alfii platform will cover the entire employee life cycle.
Since its launch, more than 250 businesses have signed up to Alfii in the MENA region. Customers are currently spread across countries, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, with the UAE comprising the bulk of the customer base.
News
NVIDIA Puts GPT-5.5 Codex In Hands Of 10,000 Staff
The chipmaker has significantly expanded OpenAI’s latest model across teams from engineering to HR under tight internal controls.
NVIDIA has started rolling out OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 model through the Codex coding agent to more than 10,000 employees, extending the tool well beyond software teams and into core business functions.
The deployment covers engineering, product, legal, marketing, finance, sales, HR, operations and developer programs. Staff are using Codex for coding, internal research and routine knowledge work as companies test whether AI agents can move from demos to daily use.
GPT-5.5 is running on NVIDIA’s GB200 NVL72 rack-scale systems, linking OpenAI’s newest model directly to the chipmaker’s latest infrastructure push. NVIDIA said the systems cut cost per million tokens by 35 times and raise token output per second per megawatt by 50 times versus earlier generations.
Inside the company, it says the effects are immediate. Debugging work that once took days is being finished in hours and experiments across large codebases that used to stretch over weeks are now handled overnight. Teams are also building features from natural-language prompts with fewer failed runs.
In a company-wide note urging staff to adopt the tool, CEO Jensen Huang wrote: “Let’s jump to lightspeed. Welcome to the age of AI.”
Security remains central to the rollout. Codex can connect through Secure Shell to approved cloud virtual machines, allowing agents to work with company data without moving it outside approved environments. NVIDIA said it assigned cloud VMs to employees so agents run in isolated sandboxes with full audit trails.
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The company added that the setup uses a zero-data-retention policy. Access to production systems is read-only through command-line tools and internal automation layers.
The move also highlights NVIDIA’s long relationship with OpenAI. NVIDIA said the partnership began in 2016, when Huang personally delivered the first DGX-1 AI supercomputer to OpenAI’s San Francisco office.
The two companies have since worked across hardware and model deployment. NVIDIA also said OpenAI plans to deploy more than 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems for future AI infrastructure.
For Gulf markets pouring money into sovereign AI and enterprise automation, the signal is clear: internal AI agents are moving from pilot phase to standard tooling.
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