UAE trade minister to chair AI firm AIREV
Move highlights AI exports increasingly tied to UAE trade strategy
#UAE #corporatemoves - UAE Minister of Foreign Trade H.E. Dr Thani Al Zeyoudi has been appointed Chairman of Abu Dhabi-based agentic AI company AIREV, the firm behind sovereign AI operating system OnDemand. The appointment links AIREV directly to the UAE’s national trade agenda as the country pushes to export AI and software alongside goods and logistics. It comes as the UAE’s non-oil foreign trade reached $1.03 trillion (AED 3.8 trillion) in 2025, up 27% year-on-year, with non-oil exports rising 45.5% to AED 813.8 billion. AIREV is backed by Abu Dhabi technology holding company Core42, a G42 company, and was established via the government’s NextGen FDI Initiative.
SO WHAT? - AIREV launched its AI operating system and agentic marketplace ahead of its time in 2024, aiming to revolutionise how AI agents are developed and deployed. It allows users to create AI and Internet of Things (IoT) agents in minutes, adding functionality from plugins and data sources and fast-tracking the development process to produce and integrate production-ready apps in the user’s own AI environment. Over the past year, global demand for agentic AI solutions has grown quickly, with UAE enterprises and government departments leading the way. The addition of Dr Thani Al Zeyoudi could add weight to AIREV’s proposition nationally and globally, aligning with the company’s plans to sell a made-in-the-UAE AI platform to the world.
KEY POINTS:
UAE Minister of Foreign Trade H.E. Dr Thani Al Zeyoudi has been appointed Chairman of Abu Dhabi-based agentic AI company AIREV, the firm behind sovereign agentic AI operating system OnDemand.
Founded in 2023 by Muhammed Khalid, Dr Youssef Youssef and Kayaan Unwalla, AIREV is backed by Core42, a G42 company. Its portfolio also includes edtech platform School Hack.
Al Zeyoudi adds a high-profile global dimension to AIREV. The minister has been instrumental to the success of the UAE’s Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA), a bilateral programme designed to lift UAE exports by at least 50% by 2030. Digital cooperation, digital infrastructure investment and AI technology exports are routinely included in the agreements.
The appointment aligns AIREV with the UAE’s foreign trade strategy at a time when non-oil trade hit $1.03 trillion in 2025, taking the “We the UAE 2031” target of AED 4 trillion in non-oil trade to 95% completion roughly six years early.
OnDemand is AIREV’s no-code and low-code platform for building and managing autonomous AI agents, serving more than four million users worldwide with over 300 specialised agents across more than 50 languages.
The platform can run in cloud, hybrid, on-premise or fully air-gapped environments, giving governments and regulated enterprises full control over data, models and infrastructure.
AIREV has partnered with US chipmaker Intel to optimise OnDemand for Intel processors and bring autonomous AI agents to Intel’s next-generation AI PCs.
The company also partnered with US chip firm Tenstorrent to co-develop an agentic AI stack for enterprise and sovereign use, launching a dedicated Agentic AI Development Node in the UAE.
It has also formed a partnership with tech distribution company Redington, supporting AIREV’s planned expansion into Europe, giving OnDemand channel reach across Middle East, Africa and South Asia.
ZOOM OUT - Founded in 2023 by Muhammed Khalid, Dr Youssef Youssef and Kayaan Unwalla, AIREV's venture capital backing traces back to a seed round in mid-2024, when Core42, the sovereign AI and cloud infrastructure arm of Abu Dhabi's G42 Group, made a strategic investment in the company. OnDemand, AIREV’s flagship platform, was launched in July 2024, onboarding around 25,000 developers in its first six weeks. The agentic AI plarform now counts more than four million users worldwide. More recently Irish venture private equity firm VentureWave Capital and Gurgaon-based Titian Capital, made investments in the startup’s limited Series A funding round. AIREV is now pursuing a Series A2 funding round and the appointment of a high-profile chairman could signal the intent for a larger-scale fund raise to support its outsized global ambitions.
[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]
Source: AIREV, MEAIN
Read more about AIREV:
Venturewave invests in UAE-based AIOS pioneer AIREV (Middle East AI News)
AIREV shakes up AI app development with OnDemand (Middle East AI News)
OnDemand AIOS adds no-code function (Middle East AI News)