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UAE’s Silkhaus Secures Pre-Series A Funding For Expansion
The cash injection includes a multi-million-dollar credit line supporting the PropTech startup’s plans for growth.
Silkhaus, a Dubai PropTech startup dedicated to transforming the short-term rental landscape in the Middle East and Asia, has recently announced a substantial pre-series A financing round. The funding comes via San Francisco-based Partners for Growth (PFG). The strategic partnership also grants Silkhaus access to a substantial credit line, which will facilitate its ambitious expansion plans.
Silkhaus harnesses cutting-edge technology to provide property owners with the essential infrastructure tools to manage and monetize their real estate assets. The startup oversees every aspect of the rental process, from handling bookings to property distribution and operations, ensuring an exceptional guest experience.
On average, property owners using Silkhaus platforms report earning between 20% to 40% more income compared to traditional rental models.
The significant cash injection means that Silkhaus is now poised to disrupt the global short-term rental sector, which boasts a valuation of over $100 billion.
Aahan Bhojani, the Founder and CEO of Silkhaus, expressed his enthusiasm for the partnership with PFG, saying, “Since our launch, Silkhaus has experienced incredible demand, growing by 120% over the past 12 months. We are thrilled to partner with the PFG team as we begin scaling Silkhaus across the GCC with a diversified capital stack and investor base”.
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Meanwhile, Armineh Baghoomian, Managing Director and Head of EMEA at Partners for Growth, praised Silkhaus for its innovative approach, noting, “Through the use of technology, Silkhaus is reinventing how landlords and institutional investors are able to monetize their asset base. Silkhaus’ strong fundamentals have put them on the path to success and we are excited to be a part of their growth story”.
Established in 2021, Silkhaus has already attracted guests from over 120 countries to its properties. In 2022, the company secured $7.75 million in funding from a consortium of global investors, marking one of the most significant seed funding rounds in the history of the GCC region.
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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.
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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.
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