News

Hub71 Launches Exclusive Capital Club In Abu Dhabi

The global tech ecosystem’s new venture will help family offices to access technology and startup investments in the region.

Published

3 years ago

October 28, 2022

Nour Nasir

Hub71

Abu Dhabi’s tech ecosystem, Hub71, has just launched a new platform called Tech Barza, an exclusive capital club dedicated to increasing investment in technology companies and startups in the region.

The platform targets regional family offices for exclusive entry to Hub71’s community of nearly 200 startups, with an aim to accelerate funding. In 2021, $2.6 billion was generated across the MENA region for startup-related projects, representing a massive 138% improvement from the previous year. Tech Barza will help to continue this trend, helping startups and tech innovators to hook up with investors and get products to market faster.

The inaugural meetup of Tech Barza included leading family offices at Hub71, which is based in the international financial center Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM). Members of the exclusive club will gain access to pitch days, investor networks, and other business events, with many led by Hub71’s partner Mubadala Investment Company.

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“The private sector has a key role in shaping the next 50 years of our nation, and family offices are, without a doubt, the heartbeat of the economy. With the launch of Tech Barza, we will not just support the economic growth of the region, but we will also bring diversity and inclusivity to family offices, removing the misconception of crowding out, and reinforcing the mission of knowledge sharing,” says Badr Al-Olama, Acting Chief Executive Officer of Hub71.

Since the launch of Hub71 in 2019, the global tech ecosystem has channeled AED 3.2 billion into the startup community and secured funding to grow several sustainable ventures which will positively impact the UAE’s capital.

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

24 hours 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.

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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.