Gamechangers: Tarjama&'s Nour Al Hassan

Nour Al Hassan’s path as an entrepreneur has been defined by spotting regional gaps—and building scalable solutions to fill them. In 2008, after noticing the lack of high-quality Arabic content, she bootstrapped and scaled her first startup, Tarjama&, which has since grown into the MENA region’s leading language technology company. Now, she’s turned her attention to a new frontier with Arabic.AI, an enterprise-grade Arabic AI solutions company that launched in April 2025.

The path to Arabic.AI began with the vantage point Al Hassan had built at Tarjama&, where she solved real-world problems faced by the world’s Arabic speakers, while also keeping her finger on the pulse of change in tech. That’s how she realized that, as artificial intelligence (AI) adoption ramped up, Arabic content, customer service, and regulatory workflows were lacking in high-quality AI support.

Arabic.AI was therefore built to provide native solutions in this regard to enterprises and governments across the region, with its proprietary Arabic large language model (LLM), Pronoia, outperforming models like GPT-4, DeepSeek, and Cohere, to rank first on the open Arabic LLM leaderboard hosted by the AI benchmarking platform, Hugging Face, when it launched in December last year.

Foundational to Al Hassan’s success is her belief that the MENA is not just a market for AI—it’s a driver of it.

“The MENA will not just consume AI—it will shape it,” she declares. “By investing in Arabic-native AI and sector-specific models, the region is carving a space for itself as a global AI innovator. With its strategic location, young, tech-savvy population, and vision-driven leadership, the MENA is poised to lead in AI applications for language, governance, smart cities, and sustainability.”

According to Al Hassan, the key to the region’s AI leadership lies in building local solutions that address the region’s most pressing challenges. “The future of AI in the GCC will be deeply localized, solving real regional needs across sectors like government, finance, healthcare, and education,” she says. “What excites me most is the shift from adopting global tools to building our own Arabic-first solutions. AI will enable the GCC economies to diversify, drive digital sovereignty, create new job categories, and export homegrown technologies globally.”

Looking forward, Al Hassan believes that localized, agentic AI “that can reason, act autonomously, and adapt to Arabic cultural, legal, and societal norms” will potentially change the game for the region.

“Most global AI models are trained with Western assumptions,” she points out. “Building AI that reflects the values, languages, and nuances of MENA societies will unlock massive adoption, and position the region as a global reference for culturally-aware AI systems.”

And given the head start Al Hassan has got herself in this space, fellow founders wanting to follow her lead would be wise to heed her words of advice. “Start before it’s perfect,” she says. “Innovation thrives when you solve a problem deeply rooted in your community. Focus on impact, not headlines.”

Pictured in the lead image is the founder and CEO of Tarjama& and Arabic.AI, Nour Al Hassan. Image courtesy Tarjama&.

Nour Al Hassan was one of the artificial intelligence (AI) innovators celebrated in Gamechangers, a special feature built for Inc. Arabia's April/May 2025 issue. For the full list of Gamechangers, please click here.