News

Hub71 Accepts 16 New Tech Startups To Join Its Community

The selected startups specialize in industries including fintech, healthtech, foodtech, cleantech, and logistics.

Published

3 years ago

August 31, 2022

Nour Nasir

Hub71

Launched back in 2019 as a means of bringing together investors, organizations, and strategic partners, the tech ecosystem known as Hub71 has recently accepted 16 new startups into its fold from the USA, UK, Italy, and more to further the progress of innovation and entrepreneurship in Abu Dhabi. The recent news comes as the company plans to expand its operational reach, scaling into other markets along with the UAE.

Over the next two years, the new startup additions will join Hub71’s incentive program that will include large-scale funding, access to a rich ecosystem of academic and corporate investors, and potential government partners. The latest round of financing at Hub71 has raised $467 million overall and will help drive progress in diverse industries, including fintech, healthtech, cleantech, edtech, foodtech, and logistics.

“Our value-driven programs continue to attract high-tech startups to Abu Dhabi that are driving transformation within key sectors of the economy. As partners to over 170 startups in our community, we always strive to connect founders to our global network of blue-chip corporations, government bodies, and investors. With our ability to unlock real growth opportunities for founders, we expect this new cohort to gain tremendous traction over the next few months within the vibrant tech ecosystem that Abu Dhabi offers,” says Badr Al-Olama, Acting CEO of Hub71.

Also Read: Disney+ Releases New MENA Content In September

Hub71’s startups include the Green Future Project, a platform supporting climate projects that track and trace environmental impact, Amwal, a platform enabling people to pay or send money based on their phone number, and Abhi, a fintech startup that lets salaried employees draw on their wages when needed.

In the first half of 2022, Hub71 helped startups land deals worth $700 million in revenues through the ecosystem’s corporate partners. Hub71 has also helped create around 1000 jobs.

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.

Published

2 days ago

January 15, 2026

Nour Nasir

uae-built falcon-h1 arabic leads llm benchmarks

Abu Dhabi Technology Innovation Institute

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.