News

UBQT Closes Pre-Seed Funding, Welcomes IQ Sayed As CTO

The Dubai-based AI-powered social app has secured $750,000 in investments and is now set to expand its feature set and user base.

Published

4 hours ago

February 26, 2025

Nour Nasir

ubqt closes pre-seed funding and welcomes i.q. sayed as cto

UBQT (pronounced Ubiquity), a UAE-based AI-powered social app designed to bring people together in real life, has successfully closed its pre-seed funding round. After securing $750,000 in investments, the company will now be able to expand operations, begin new feature development, and help grow its user base.

Since its launch in January 2024, UBQT has quickly grown in popularity, amassing nearly 5,000 organic downloads and forging key partnerships with the likes of GITEX, Step Conference Dubai, The Offline Club, and Emotion Network in Milan. With fresh funding in hand, the company remains focused on its mission: helping people reduce their screen time and build more meaningful, real-world connections.

ubqt new cto i.q. sayed

UBQT has also welcomed IQ Sayed as its third co-founder and Chief Technology Officer. A seasoned technologist with an impressive track record at Meta and Careem, Sayed brings invaluable expertise in scaling digital products and will soon become the driving force in UBQT’s next phase of expansion as it sets out to disrupt traditional social networking models.

“We are absolutely thrilled to close this funding round and to have IQ join us,” said Jonathan Hasson, Co-Founder of UBQT. “This is just the beginning. With the new funding and IQ on board, we’re ready to build an even better platform that champions meaningful, real-world interactions. We’re also looking ahead to our upcoming Seed round this spring, which will enable us to scale further and enhance the user experience”.

Also Read: Foodics Acquires Online-Ordering Specialist & Invests In 3 Startups

With Sayed on board, UBQT enters an exciting new chapter. The powerhouse team will soon begin to enhance the platform’s technological capabilities, scale its user base, and solidify UBQT’s position in the consumer tech space.

Learn more about UBQT on their website and download the app which is available for both Android and iOS.

News

Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet Introduces Hybrid Reasoning

The latest model lets users choose between rapid responses or slower, but more methodical, step-by-step answers.

Published

1 day ago

February 25, 2025

Nour Nasir

Anthropic

After an exciting start to 2025 with the release of DeepSeek’s Chatbot, it’s now Anthropic’s turn to unveil its latest AI model — Claude 3.7 Sonnet. The new tool is designed to strike a balance between speed and deeper responses, and is being marketed as the first hybrid reasoning model. Claude now gives users the option to choose between rapid responses or a more methodical, step-by-step approach, using a simple dropdown menu to let you decide how queries should be processed.

“We’ve developed Claude 3.7 Sonnet with a different philosophy from other reasoning models on the market. Just as humans use a single brain for both quick responses and deep reflection, we believe reasoning should be an integrated capability of frontier models rather than a separate model entirely,” Anthropic explains. “This unified approach also creates a more seamless experience for users”.

While Anthropic doesn’t call out OpenAI directly, the comparison is hard to ignore. OpenAI currently offers multiple models — GPT-4, o1, o1-mini, and o3-mini — creating a somewhat fragmented experience. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently acknowledged this issue, posting on X, “We hate the model picker as much as you do and want to return to magic unified intelligence”.

Claude 3.7 Sonnet was also developed with a different focus in mind: Rather than prioritizing high-stakes math and coding challenges, Anthropic aimed to optimize real-world applications. According to the company, users will see notable improvements in areas like coding and front-end web development, reflecting how businesses and developers actually engage with AI.

Also Read: Top Free AI Chatbots Available In The Middle East

The new model is available starting today across all Claude plans, including Anthropic’s free tier. Developers can also access it through Anthropic’s API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.

Additionally, Anthropic is also rolling out a new tool called Claude Code, designed to streamline software development. This “agentic” system, currently in limited research preview, allows developers to assign coding tasks directly to Claude via a terminal interface. It can read and edit code, run tests, and even push commits to GitHub — offering a glimpse into a more automated, AI-assisted workflow.