Saudi startup think raises $8 million for AI infrastructure
MENA’s largest AI infrastructure Pre-Seed round led by RAED, Wa’ed Ventures
#SaudiArabia #funding - Riyadh-based AI infrastructure venture Think has raised more than $8 million in what could be the largest AI infrastructure and deeptech pre-seed round in the Middle East and North Africa. The round was co-led by RAED Ventures and Aramco-owned Wa’ed Ventures, with Dhahran Techno Valley’s venture capital arm and strategic angel investors also participating. Think builds hardware and software designed to cut the cost of running AI models, and says its platform has achieves GPU utilisation above 90 percent in production testing, compared to an industry average of 30-50 percent.
SO WHAT? - Think’s pitch, squeezing far more output from your GPUs, rather than paying global cloud costs is one that should resonate with Saudi enterprises. GPU costs and data sovereignty concerns are currently pushing both government and commercial sectors to look beyond hyperscale cloud providers. Many enterprise technology buyers are no longer measuring CIO performance simply on how fast they can implement AI, but also its outcomes, impacts and costs. Managing rising AI inference and communications costs is now high on corporate agendas.
KEY POINTS;
Riyadh-based AI infrastructure venture Think has raised over $8 million in a pre-seed funding round co-led by RAED Ventures and Wa’ed Ventures.
Dhahran Techno Valley’s venture capital arm and strategic angel investors also participated in the round. The new funds will support team expansion, manufacturing scale-up, product development and international growth.
Think combines high-density, liquid-cooled multi-GPU compute nodes with proprietary orchestration software called ILM, designed to maximise GPU utilisation and lower the cost of deploying AI models.
In production benchmark testing, the platform sustained GPU utilisation above 90%, compared with an industry average of 30-50%, using standard, widely available GPUs rather than specialist hardware.
The company says its per-million-token cost runs at almost 10 times lower than the average cost of using frontier models from Google, OpenAI and Anthropic.
Think was founded by Ahmed AlSharif, a former Meta, Sony PlayStation Europe and EA Games executive, and Ammar Enaya, whose career includes leadership roles at Cisco, HPE Aruba and Vectra AI.
The company is already running proofs of concept, production deployments and strategic partnerships across Saudi Arabia, including engagement with the Kingdom’s national AI company HUMAIN.
Think plans to expand across the GCC over the next 18 months while developing ILM as a standalone software platform, alongside continued deployment across Saudi Arabia.
ZOOM IN - Think's technology rests on three products: the AI SuperNode, a compute unit it says delivers 135% greater power density than comparable enterprise GPU servers using the same silicon; the ILM System, orchestration software that allocates workloads dynamically across GPUs based on live thermal and memory data; and Constellation, which turns ordinary office computer networks into supercompute clusters outside working hours. The company holds four patents pending and pitches the combination as a way to own AI infrastructure outright, promising returns inside 12 months, rather than paying recurring cloud costs of foreign providers.
[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]
Source: Think