Saudi Deeptech Startup Think Closes MENA's Largest AI Infrastructure Pre-Seed Round at $8 Million

Think, a Saudi based company building unified hardware and software infrastructure for artificial intelligence, has raised more than 8 million dollars in pre-seed funding, marking what its backers describe as the largest AI infrastructure and deeptech pre-seed round in MENA to date.

The round was co-led by RAED Ventures and Wa'ed Ventures, the venture capital arm wholly owned by Saudi Aramco, with participation from Dhahran Techno Valley's venture capital arm and a group of strategic angel investors. The capital will fund team expansion, manufacturing scale up, product development and international growth as the company accelerates deployments across Saudi Arabia and expands into the wider GCC.

Solving AI's efficiency problem rather than chasing bigger models

Think was founded by Ahmed AlSharif, a technology leader whose career spans senior roles at Meta, Sony PlayStation Europe and EA Games, alongside enterprise technology veteran Ammar Enaya, who previously held leadership positions at Cisco, HPE Aruba and Vectra AI. Rather than competing on model size, the company is targeting the escalating cost and complexity of AI infrastructure itself.

"As the industry moves beyond the race for bigger models and larger data centres, a new age of efficiency is beginning," said AlSharif. "AI infrastructure today is expensive, inefficient, and increasingly difficult to scale. Think exists to help organisations do more with the compute they already have."

The company's platform combines high density, liquid cooled multi GPU compute nodes with proprietary bare metal orchestration software called ILM, designed to maximise GPU utilisation using existing, widely available hardware rather than specialist inference chips. In production benchmark testing, the platform achieved sustained GPU utilisation above 90 percent, compared with an industry average of 30 to 50 percent, alongside a per million token cost the company says is nearly ten times lower than using frontier models from Google, OpenAI and Anthropic directly. That efficiency pitch stands in deliberate contrast to the region's other dominant infrastructure narrative, where government backed projects have raced to build ever larger, more powerful physical hardware rather than squeezing more output from existing compute.

A sovereignty pitch aimed squarely at the Kingdom's AI ambitions

With Saudi Arabia accelerating its national AI ambitions, Think positions itself as building what it calls the engine room of the AI era, an integrated infrastructure layer intended to power secure, efficient and sovereign AI deployments across the Kingdom and wider region. The company is already engaged in multiple proofs of concept and production deployments across Saudi Arabia, including work alongside initiatives connected to HUMAIN, the country's PIF backed sovereign AI champion.

"Our customers want the benefits of AI without the spiralling costs, security concerns, and dependence associated with hyperscale cloud providers," said Ammar Enaya, the company's co-founder. Wael Nafee, General Partner at RAED Ventures, framed the investment thesis similarly: "The next generation of AI leaders will be defined not only by the models they build, but by the infrastructure that makes AI practical, affordable and sovereign." That framing echoes a theme increasingly present across the region's AI infrastructure conversations, where the underlying data streaming and processing layer is being treated by enterprise buyers as strategically important as the AI models running on top of it.

Anas Algahtani, Chief Executive of Wa'ed Ventures, said the investment reflected a broader national opportunity. "Saudi Arabia has a unique opportunity not only to adopt AI, but to build the infrastructure that powers it," he said. Faizan Baig, Chief Investment Officer at Dhahran Techno Valley, added that sovereign and efficient AI infrastructure is now foundational to national AI ambitions across the region.

Think plans to accelerate commercial deployments across Saudi Arabia over the coming months while expanding its platform and international presence, with a stated goal of extending across the GCC over the next 18 months.