UAE-Based AVELIN AI Pockets US$3.7 Million In A Pre-Seed Funding Round

AVELIN AI, a Dubai-headquartered sovereign artificial intelligence (AI) platform built for enterprises and governments in regulated industries, has secured US$3.7 million in a pre-seed funding round from angel investors.  

AVELIN is led by founder and CEO Yury Akinin, who was previously the co-founder of US-based Quantori, a life sciences AI company that reached a valuation of more than $100 million. With the capital it has raised, AVELIN aims to accelerate its commercial expansion across the Middle East, Europe, and North America, scale its graphics processing unit (GPU) infrastructure, and further develop its proprietary cross-model fusion technology.  

In an interview with Inc. Arabia, Akinin discussed AVELIN's offering against a backdrop of growing interest in sovereign AI. “Today, most AI technology sits in the hands of big techs based in the US and China,” he explained. “The rest of the world doesn't have its own AI, and that creates dependence. More than 120 countries have already applied regulations to push local AI development. That is what sovereign AI means: having the technology in your own hands, on your own land. Right now, the only way to do that is to install open-source models. But an open-source model is not a platform—it doesn't connect your business applications, and those models usually don't reach the level of intelligence the big techs offer. At the same time, about half of all business is highly regulated and needs exactly this: inference running on its own GPUs, models that can compete with frontier companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, or the Chinese players, and all of it delivered as a platform that is easy to integrate.  

“That is what AVELIN does,” Akinin continued. “With an enterprise license, our platform is 100 percent installable on the client's premises, fully air-gapped, with no data leakage, no data loss, no shadow AI, and no third party involved. We sell the license, and we don't limit or restrict the software we deliver. It runs our optimized, fused models for different kinds of work: intelligence tasks, coding tasks, and a special agentic model family built for long-running agentic work with multiple tool calls. And it works on your cluster out of the box. Keep in mind that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic can be installed inside an enterprise: those are closed models, and they will not be given into anyone's hands. So, for enterprise clients, this is a unique possibility."  

Akinin also contrasted AVELIN's approach with that of other AI infrastructure providers in the market, arguing that his company's strength lies in integrating capabilities that are often offered separately. “Most companies here do one specific part of the job,” he said. “Some only build inference. Some purchase GPUs and rent them out. Some only train and optimize models. Some are token factories selling an AI platform priced per token. AVELIN interconnects all of those levels: we do inference, we do model optimization for business tasks, and we wrap it into a platform that makes integration easy. Our battlefield is the best cost per task done. We are fully compatible with the OpenAI and Anthropic application programming interface (API) standards; so, any company can give us a trial run by changing two lines in their configuration: the base URL and the key."  

AVELIN today operates across three countries. Besides its headquarters in the UAE, the company also has a team of engineers in Seattle in the US, as well as a development team in Armenia. According to Akinin, the company's base in the MENA region places it at the center of one of its most promising markets. “The MENA specifically gives [us] a lot of opportunities,” Akinin added. “It is a very good place for AI startups: the intensity around AI coming from the region's leadership and royal families gives us visibility and real momentum here. Of course, that attracts other companies; so, the market is getting a bit crowded. But most of them build agents—an agent for your calendar, for your daily calorie budget, for image generation—and all of those need core platform technologies underneath. We build the basement they all stand on. So, those startups are not competitors for us, they are potential clients. We don't compete with them. We sell to them, and we love them.” 

AVELIN’s value proposition also resonated with investors during its fundraising process. “What helped is that everyone who is connected to AI already understands the problems we solve,” Akinin said. “They understand cost, which means return on investment on AI integration. They understand intelligence, which lets you do more tasks with AI agents. And they understand speed, because a clever model that is very slow doesn't give you the advantage a faster model does. We had real research and development results to show: how precise we are, how we increase intelligence and speed, how we reduce cost per task. Maybe the secret sauce was simply telling what we have, as it is. You don't trick anyone; you just show what you have. Many of those business owners recognized that approach, and it gave us the first basement to step onto this market. The next step is the larger venture capital funds, which we have started working with right now, and it is the same approach: tell the story, show the numbers.” 

With AVELIN thus now getting set to scale, Akinin told Inc. Arabia that he’s making sure to apply lessons learnt from his last entrepreneurial journey. “I was a little younger then, and I moved fast,” he recalled. “Sometimes too fast for the market, bringing a product too early, or pushing the team to move faster than is reasonable. What I learned is that sometimes you shouldn't be so fast. You have to be right in time, not too early and not too late, because then you spend fewer resources for nothing. Don't push things to happen faster than is required by the market, the team, the people, the investors. And I think the right moment for AVELIN is exactly now. The AI future is already recognized by people, business owners, companies; everyone understands its importance. But there are not yet many solutions like ours, frontier-level models installable on premises. Some companies and competitors are appearing on this market, and that is good. It shows we made the right move, that we see this market, and [that we] can compete and succeed in it as well.”

Pictured in the lead image is AVELIN AI founder and CEO Yury Akinin. Image courtesy AVELIN AI.