UAE-Based qeen.ai Secures US$10 Million In Seed Round

qeen.ai, a UAE-based generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform that offers autonomous agents for e-commerce businesses, has raised US$10 million in funding, marking one of the largest seed investments in the MENA region.

The funding round was led by Prosus Ventures, with additional participation from existing investors such as Wamda Capital, 10x Founders, and Dara Holdings. This latest investment brings qeen.ai’s total funding to $12 million. 

Founded in 2023 by former Google and DeepMind colleagues Morteza Ibrahimi, Ahmad Khwileh, and Dina Alsamhan, qeen.ai is headquartered in Dubai. The funding will fuel qeen.ai’s growth strategy by enhancing its agentic AI platform, broadening its market reach, and strengthening its team. The company aims to build on its fully autonomous content and marketing agents, extending its capabilities to address a wider array of challenges faced by online businesses. 

In an interview with Inc. Arabia, Alsamhan, co-founder and chief business officer (CBO) of qeen.ai, shared the company’s growth plans in MENA and how it wants to transform e-commerce with AI-driven automation. “Traditional AI solutions rely on static, pre-trained models to perform specific tasks based on fixed patterns and datasets," she explained. "While effective for task-specific applications like image recognition and recommendation systems, they often require extensive human intervention to act on the output or adapt to new scenarios." 

Driven by shifting consumer behavior, advancements in digital payments, and the modernization of logistics infrastructure, the e-commerce market is expected to reach $50 billion in the MENA by 2025, with Saudi Arabia and the UAE leading this growth. Amid this transformation, qeen.ai leverages proprietary technology to create AI agents that autonomously perform tasks and continuously optimize results by learning from user behavior.

Designed for e-commerce businesses, these AI agents handle functions such as content creation, marketing, and conversational sales. By automating these processes, the platform empowers merchants to achieve performance gains that surpass traditional AI solutions and human-driven operations. Alsamhan also highlighted the company’s broader vision for AI-powered marketing solutions, starting with WhatsApp marketing and gradually extending to other channels. 

Alsamhan shared her perspective on how qeen.ai plans to contribute to the region’s growth, particularly in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. “Scaling an e-commerce business in MENA is uniquely complex," she said. "For example, cross-border e-commerce represents nearly half of the market in GCC countries like Saudi and the UAE, and a significant share of [the] MENA overall. This means that local businesses are not only competing with each other, but also with larger peers and powerful global players looking to capitalize on the region’s rapid growth." 

Alsamhan also highlighted how qeen.ai’s AI-driven approach goes beyond traditional automation, enabling businesses to adapt in real time. “qeen.ai’s agentic AI is fundamentally different," she noted. "Our autonomous AI agents don’t just process information; they observe, learn, and optimize outcomes in real time. These agents operate as decision-makers, dynamically adjusting content, marketing, and sales strategies based on live customer behavior and business objectives." 

On its ambitious plans to expand its reach within the e-commerce industry, Alsamhan said, “This $10 million seed round, led by Prosus Ventures, is a strategic milestone that will enable us to scale qeen.ai’s platform by expanding our AI capabilities and infrastructure, and growing our market presence... We are investing significantly in R&D to advance our AI agents’ decision-making and optimization abilities, allowing them to do more for merchants and become their go-to partner to grow their business.” 

Additionally, qeen.ai addresses the unique challenge of cultural and language adaptation in the MENA region. Alsamhan emphasized the importance of Arabic content, particularly in Saudi Arabia. “In Saudi Arabia, where Arabic-first digital experiences drive higher engagement, our AI agents generate and optimize Arabic content and marketing activities at scale, ensuring merchants reach customers in a language and tone that resonates,” she noted. 

She also gave an example of the platform’s Dynamic Content Agent, which creates product descriptions that evolve in real time based on audience engagement, language preferences, and conversion trends — features that static AI tools can't achieve. She went on to note that this has led to a more than 30 percent increase in sales for merchants that leverage qeen.ai’s AI-powered content automation.

Alsamhan also told us that qeen.ai is expanding its AI capabilities beyond its Dynamic Content Agent, noting that the company has already begun testing its Growth Marketing Agent with design partners. Early results have shown significant improvements in engagement metrics and campaign performance. 

Alsamhan shared the company’s plans to further enhance its AI offerings with a new product. “We are also working on a Conversational Sales Agent that will go beyond answering queries to actively driving sales — dynamically optimizing upsells, product recommendations, and customer engagement based on user interactions,” she noted.  

Looking ahead, qeen.ai remains committed to advancing its AI-driven solutions to e-commerce businesses across the region. “Our goal is to empower e-commerce businesses of all sizes - whether they are local SMEs or regional enterprise-scale retailers - to compete at a global level using AI,” Alsamhan concluded. 

Pictured on image: Dina Alsamhan, co-founder and CBO, qeen.ai . Image courtesy qeen.ai.