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Female Entrepreneurship Is Growing Rapidly In The UAE
The United Arab Emirates is seeing greater female representation in startups, boardrooms, and venture funding firms.
A rise in the number of women-led startups and venture funds is set to boost female entrepreneurship across the United Arab Emirates, which has already grown significantly in recent years. In October, global technology group e& launched a $250 million venture capital fund to support a new startup ecosystem and diversity and inclusion of women are crucial parameters to qualify for investment.
“Women have a voice that is loud and clear in boardrooms, in investment committees, and in funding rounds. I see a lot of opportunities created for women, especially in recent years,” explained Zahra El Zayat, chief commercial officer at evision, during an online panel hosted by the Atlantic Council’s WIn Fellowship earlier this week.
Meanwhile, Yousef Al Otaiba, the UAE’s ambassador to the US, explained to the panel, “I know funding, in general, is hard, even for young men now, it is not just a challenge for women [but] we have to create the right ecosystem and allow more encouragement, more risk-taking and more incentivizing for women [to motivate them to] enter this space”.
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Nearly half of female business owners in the UAE find it tough to raise capital, with up to 80% tapping into personal savings to achieve their goals, according to Visa’s Women SMB Digitalisation Index.
However, the index also found that women-owned companies in the UAE scored highly regarding digital marketing, online presence, and customer engagement.
The UAE’s government has passed several laws over the past 15 years to enhance female contribution to society and sustainable development goals, reflecting a genuine commitment to equality across economic, social, and work environments.
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At I/O 2026, Sundar Pichai Concedes AI Must Deliver Real Value
Gemini 3.5, a personal agent called Spark, agentic shopping, and Android XR eyewear are all aimed at making AI feel useful, not just impressive.
Google’s annual I/O developer conference (I/O 2026) has recently become a status update on the same question: can the company turn its AI spending into products people use every day? This year, chief executive Sundar Pichai described Google as being in a phase of hyper progress, while conceding this is the part of the cycle where people want to see real value in the products they use on a day-to-day basis.
The strategy on display was to push agents — AI systems that act on a user’s behalf — into nearly every Google product at once. Search now has an “intelligent search box” that returns generated explainer videos alongside links. Gmail, Docs, YouTube and Maps are gaining their own agent layers, including a Docs Live feature that turns spoken instructions into drafted text with citations.
Two new models, Gemini 3.5 and a cheaper Gemini 3.5 Flash, arrived the same day. Google says 900 million people now use Gemini, and that more than 50 billion images have been generated with it. The pricing tier names are likely to confuse buyers: a new AI Ultra plan launches at $100 a month, while the older Gemini AI Ultra drops from $250 to $200.
The flashier announcements were Gemini Omni, a video generator pitched as a more realistic answer to OpenAI’s discontinued Sora 2, and Gemini Spark, a personal agent that handles recurring tasks across a user’s Google account. A new universal shopping cart lets agents complete purchases across multiple retailers from inside Google itself, placing the company between the merchant and the buyer, and also owning the checkout.
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Google also confirmed its Android XR eyewear, built with Samsung and frames from Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. Audio-only glasses ship this autumn; a display-equipped version, which would superimpose live translations into the wearer’s field of view, is still in development. Both sets translate, however only the display version shows you the result.
What Pichai did not resolve is the bargain underneath all this. An agent is only useful to the degree it knows your calendar, your inbox, your shopping history and your physical surroundings. Google has now confirmed that, in time, the same context may carry advertising.
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