Ayan, a UAE-based artificial intelligence start-up, has raised Dh2.2 million in pre-seed funding from strategic global business angels to expand rapidly beyond the Middle East and North Africa, where it already leads in front office intelligence for AI-led buying.
Shoppers now meet a brand twice. First in AI, which answers their questions in words the brand never wrote. Then in store, where the advisor in front of them was briefed on last year’s brand book.
“There’s a version of your brand you’ve never read. It’s the only one your customers meet,” said Pablo Charron, Ayan’s founder and Chief Executive Officer. “And it’s already deciding who gets recommended, without you in the room. Ayan reads that version, acts on it wherever the customer decides, and measures what moved.”
Ayan works as a loop. Its agentic platform has analysed millions of data points on how AI describes brands, measured against each brand’s positioning. It then acts across every channel where the sale happens, from product pages and campaigns before they go live to every sales advisor’s phone, and measures what each action changed in AI answers. What customers ask at the counter flows back in and becomes the next thing Ayan fixes.
Tools that track AI visibility stop at the screen, and clienteling tools do not know what AI said. Ayan follows the customer from the answer to the counter, and already serves more than 50 brands across MENA, Europe and North America.
Charron co-founded Ayan with Chakir El Messaoudi, its Chief Growth Officer. “The advisor used to be the first expert a customer met. Now they are the second,” El Messaoudi said. “Our job is to make sure they are the better-informed one.”
Ayan also appointed Vincent Carvalho, Chief Growth Officer, M&A Group at IFS and its former President Asia-Pacific Japan, Middle East and Africa, as founding board member, and Christian Pedersen, Group Chief Executive Officer at Cegid, and former chief product officer at IFS and SAP, as adviser.
“Brands everywhere are losing the first conversation with their customers to AI, and most cannot even hear it. That is the biggest blind spot in front office software, and one of its biggest opportunities in a decade. Ayan is built to close it, starting in MENA and scaling globally,” Carvalho said.
“Front office systems were built for a customer who talks to the brand first. That customer now talks to AI first. Ayan shows brands, independently, what AI tells their customers, and lets every team act on it,” Pedersen said.
AI and AI-enabled companies in MENA raised $678 million in the first half of 2026, up 81% from a year earlier, according to data platform MAGNiTT. The UAE accounted for 93% of that total.
In April, the UAE Cabinet approved a plan to run half of government services on agentic AI within two years, under the National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence 2031.
