News
Hotel Cloud Kitchen Startup Matbakhi Launches In Saudi Arabia
The platform will help Saudi Arabian hotels tap into a $4.71 billion online food delivery market as the Kingdom pursues ambitions of becoming a Top 10 tourist destination.
Matbakhi, a food technology startup, has become the latest addition to Saudi Arabia’s booming catering sector after setting up a headquarters in Riyadh.
Matbakhi’s premise is simple yet innovative: The company helps hotels turn their unused kitchen spaces into revenue generators, upgrading their menus with fresh, creative offerings from young, up-and-coming local chefs. The idea is to give local talent a platform and help chefs build their brands, while simultaneously offering a delivery service to bring the meals to different neighborhoods.
“The way food is conceptualized, sourced, cooked, delivered, and consumed is evolving by the minute in line with the preferences of highly aware and increasingly knowledgeable consumers. Keeping these customers at the heart of everything we do, Matbakhi aims to make the food you want accessible and convenient to order, and ensure that it is delivered to your doorstep in minutes while you’re still looking forward to that taste and experience,” says Joe Frem, co-founder and CEO of Matbakhi.
Also Read: Egypt’s Tech Startup OneOrder Raises $3M In Funding
Matbakhi’s cloud kitchens are effectively a plug-and-play service for hotels. The company offers everything from procurement to staff, helping to raise the profile of local chefs while enhancing the revenue and marketing reach of the hotels hosting the service.
The company’s novel business model will create unique opportunities within Saudi Arabia’s buoyant hospitality sector, especially as the Kingdom plans to become a Top 10 global tourist destination by 2030.
With help from Matbakhi, the hotel food and beverage sector could be transformed entirely, blending seamlessly into the online food delivery market, which, according to a report from Innovius Research, is predicted to be worth a staggering $8.8 billion in value by 2028.
News
UAE-Built Falcon-H1 Arabic Leads LLM Benchmarks
The lean Emirati-built language model beats larger global systems and puts Arabic at the center of training.
Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute has released an Arabic-first large language model that tops global test boards, an uncommon edge for a region long served by English-centric systems.
Falcon-H1 Arabic comes in 3B, 7B and 34B versions. The flagship posts 75.36% accuracy on comprehensive Arabic tasks and ranks first on the Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard. It also outperforms Meta’s Llama-70B and Alibaba’s Qwen-72B while using less than half their parameters. The smallest model beats Microsoft’s Phi-4 Mini by ten percentage points on equivalent benchmarks.
Arabic remains hard territory for AI. Flexible word order, dense morphology and constant switching between regional dialects and Modern Standard Arabic leave many global models missing context or tone. Academic research has pointed to a shortage of annotated datasets for dialect and informal speech. The impact shows up in classrooms, call centers and government portals where Arabic chatbots lag their English counterparts.
TII trained Falcon-H1 Arabic on formal writing, dialects and culturally grounded content. Beyond scores, it handles practical use: long conversations, reasoning rather than literal translation, and inputs of up to 192,000 words — enough for medical records or legal filings.
“The aim is innovation that is accessible, relevant, and impactful,” said Faisal Al Bannai, Adviser to the UAE President and Secretary-General of the Advanced Technology Research Council.
Also Read: Governata Raises $4M For Saudi AI Data-Governance Push
Arabic is spoken by more than 450 million people across over 20 countries, yet has often been treated as a secondary language for foundation models. The UAE move signals a push to flip that logic and build Arabic-native stacks rather than wait for global systems to improve.
Falcon models have led their categories since 2023. With H1 Arabic, TII is offering free access via chat.falconllm.tii.ae for developers, media, healthcare and public-sector users looking to automate in natural Arabic.
As the region continues to invest in sovereign computing and data localization, the addition of Falcon-H1 Arabic adds a powerful tool built for the native language, instead of an afterthought attached to an English-trained system.
UAE-Built Falcon-H1 Arabic Leads LLM Benchmarks
UAE Users Sleep Less, But More Efficiently, ŌURA Data Reveals
Governata Raises $4M For Saudi AI Data-Governance Push
Zoho Opens First UAE Data Centers For Local Cloud Solutions
EDT&Partners Buys eFlow To Bolster AI Learning Push
Clicks Bets On Physical Keyboards With CES 2026 Launch
Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra Leaks Point To February 2026 Reveal
Belkin Launches Wireless HDMI Adapter With 131-Foot Range
Syria Rolls Out First National Tourism Discount Card
