News

Hub71 To Invest $2 Billion In New Web3 Startup Ecosystem

Hub71+ Digital Assets will give startups access to venture capital companies and technology providers in Abu Dhabi and beyond.

Published

3 years ago

February 16, 2023

Nour Nasir

Hub71

Abu Dhabi global technology accelerator Hub71 is seeking to disrupt the Web3 space with the announcement of a new ecosystem focused on startup funding and blockchain technologies.

Over $2 billion has already been committed in capital, enabling the new Hub71+ Digital Assets ecosystem to offer Web3 startups access to venture capital companies, customers, tech providers, blockchain platforms, and much more.

hub71 digital assets launch event

Hub71’s anchor partner is First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB), and its research and innovation center, known as FABRIC, will, in turn, help FAB to leverage its financial services in the metaverse. Further corporate, government, and investment partners will support the project’s growth across the UAE and beyond.

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“Hub71+ Digital Assets signifies that Abu Dhabi is open to disruptive businesses driving forward change and transformation on a global level. Teaming up with ADGM, FAB and its research and innovation center, FABRIC, alongside the world’s leading Web3 companies and enablers under one roof, will provide founders with an opportunity to fundraise, develop and commercialize innovations safely while operating within the largest regulated jurisdiction of virtual assets in the MENA region,” says Ahmad Ali Alwan, Deputy CEO of Hub71.

The new Hub71 alliance will help startups benefit from ADGM’s diverse ecosystem and efficient regulatory environment, which will help develop the UAE economy to keep pace with global trends.

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.