UAE-Based Regtech Startup Qadi Raises Pre-Seed Round As It Emerges From Stealth Mode

UAE-based regulatory compliance technology startup Qadi has secured a pre-seed funding round led by UAE-based investment firm Incubayt, marking its first external capital raise since launching in stealth mode earlier this year.  

The company, which was founded by Mohamad ElCharif in the UAE in 2025, builds artificial intelligence (AI) agents that understand, interpret, and apply regional regulations inside an institution’s workflows such that legal and compliance teams can work faster without losing control of risk or data. The startup describes itself as the Middle East’s first sovereign regulatory compliance platform built specifically for the region’s increasingly complex legal landscape. 

With its new funding, Qadi plans to grow its AI and legal engineering teams and begin rolling out its platform to selected law firms and financial institutions across the GCC. As regulatory frameworks continue to expand, and as global capital flows into the region accelerate, the company aims to embed regulatory intelligence into daily operations so institutions can strengthen governance while scaling more efficiently. 

In an interview with Inc. Arabia, ElCharif shared that he spent seven years implementing large-scale AI and machine learning systems, working both in the region and internationally, before launching Qadi. It was during a project where he led the CoreAI program for France-based marketing giant Publicis Groupe, which involved developing an agentic marketing platform some of the world's largest brands, that he first conceived of Qadi. "The pivotal moment for me was a project for Pfizer," ElCharif recalled. "We built an agentic workflow that didn't just generate content; it automated the compliance review of media assets across disparate geographies. Seeing an AI agent successfully navigate that regulatory complexity at scale was my 'aha' moment." 

That experience prompted ElCharif to think about developing a similar tool for legal compliance in the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan, and Turkey (MENAT), a region he views as one of the most intricate regulatory environments globally. “We have one of the most complex, nuanced, and rapidly evolving regulatory landscapes in the world," ElCharif noted. "I realized that if we are to honor the ambitions of national visions of the UAE and Saudi Arabia, we cannot rely on imported models to navigate our laws. We need a sovereign solution.” 

According to ElCharif, that meant creating AI systems built on regional laws, housed within regional institutions, and aligned with local governance, and that perspective became the foundation for Qadi’s approach. Instead of developing point solutions that automate single tasks or act as legal chatbots, the company encodes local laws, regulations, and institutional policies into AI agents that operate inside an organization's existing systems. These agents interpret rules, monitor activity, and support legal and compliance teams in real time. “Qadi’s mission is to provide the region with a sovereign, AI-native regulatory backbone,” ElCharif asserted.

To deliver this, Qadi structures its platform around the realities of the MENAT's jurisdictions. It breaks down regional regulations and internal playbooks into machine-actionable logic so agents can screen contracts, analyze marketing materials, and enforce internal policies. Its functions range from reviewing non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and master service agreements (MSAs) to routing documents for approval and notifying teams when deals progress. 

And it was precisely this regional-first architecture that helped shape investor conviction in Qadi. ElCharif said that when he began early discussions about Qadi, legaltech adoption worldwide was rising, signaling that AI would become central to how legal work is done. “Leading law firms and sophisticated in-house teams globally are already adopting point solutions," he pointed out. "This proves that AI is moving from the margins to the core of legal work.” 

But what investors found most compelling about Qadi’s positioning was its ability to address the deeper question of who governs AI-driven compliance workloads in the region. “If you look at the progress of large language models over just the past two years and project five to ten years out, it’s clear that a significant share of legal and regulatory workflows will be executed by AI agent systems that can read rules, watch activity, and complete transactions end-to-end under human supervision," ElCharif said. "The strategic question for our region becomes ‘who owns and orchestrates those agents and AI inference workloads?’ Investors backed Qadi because we had a clear answer” 

"We believe those workloads must be sovereign, trained on our laws and policies, governed here, and deployed inside an institution’s own environment," ElCharif continued. "We had the background to build it based on deep experience in delivering large-scale AI programs in production, a practitioner’s understanding of the MENAT’s regulatory complexity, and a conviction that the infrastructure layer for legal and compliance has to come from the region, not be imported.” 

Qadi founder Mohamad El Charif with Incubayt founder Sami Khoreibi. Image courtesy Qadi.

Critically, ElCharif is acutely aware of the need to address the gaps that are emerging as a result of the unprecedented pace of change in the business, economic, and regulatory landscape in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and the wider GCC. This, says ElCharif, requires adapting AI solutions to act as infrastructure rather than just tools. “A lot of the conversation around ‘AI for legal’ today is about tools that make individual tasks more efficient," he said. "Those are useful, but the real unlock and the next shift as we see it will be infrastructural.”

Plus, with businesses scaling faster, ElCharif noted that traditional legal and compliance teams are not nearly enough to keep up with this scale of demand. He also highlighted the structural gaps inside institutions that contribute to more work, and ultimately, slower decision-making cycles. “In most organizations, the law lives in PDFs, memos, and email threads, while the work lives in customer relationship management [and] enterprise resource planning systems, marketing platforms, and deal rooms," he said. "Human beings are the integration layer between the two. Every time a new product is launched, a campaign is approved or a cross-border structure is designed, someone has to manually interpret the rules, check them against internal policies, and then chase people across systems.”

By reducing those checks and bottlenecks, Qadi aims to help institutions accelerate without compromising oversight. As ElCharif puts it, “That’s how you unlock growth. You reduce the time it takes to launch a product, close a deal, or ship a campaign, without loosening your grip on risk or data. You let human experts spend more time on strategy and negotiation, and less on being the manual glue between law and systems.” 

But translating regional regulations into machine-actionable logic introduces its own complexity. “The most difficult challenges have been less about AI in the abstract, and more about faithfully reflecting and capturing legal nuance in a living, breathing regulatory landscape," ElCharif revealed. "In MENAT, regulations are evolving to support ambitious agendas like Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 and the UAE’s broader digital and financial-hub strategies. New rules are introduced frequently, sometimes without long histories of case law or market practice to clarify interpretation. At the same time, many institutions operate across 10 or more jurisdictions, each with its own regulators, free zones, and sectoral supervisors. Encoding that into machine-actionable logic is not a one-off project; it’s a living system.” 

Qadi’s answer to this is to invest deeply in legal engineering and build systems that balance automation with oversight. “We work with regional experts to deconstruct laws and internal policies into structured logic, including conditions, thresholds, exceptions, and cross-references while being honest about what should remain a judgment call,” ElCharif explained said. And when the law is ambiguous, the AI routes cases to humans rather than forcing artificial certainty, with rigorous evaluation underpinning that structure. “Every recommendation is logged, and we can trace it back to the specific provision or policy block that drove it." ElCharif said. "That makes it possible for clients to audit, challenge, and refine the system over time.” 

ElCharif also pointed out that Qadi is designed so that humans remain in the loop. “Qadi is built to take first-pass responsibility for high-volume, repeatable checks… so that legal and compliance teams can focus on edge cases, interpretation and strategy," he noted. And for ElCharif, this combination of regional legal expertise, explicit modeling, and continuous evaluation is essential. “Accuracy and trustworthiness, in our view, come from that combination: regional legal depth, explicit modelling of rules, continuous evaluation, and a clear philosophy that AI should elevate human experts rather than replace them,” he said. 

For other entrepreneurs looking to build in legaltech, ElCharif advises them to be aware of the responsibility that comes with operating in such a sensitive domain. “My honest advice is to treat this space with both ambition and humility," he said. "If you’re entering the AI-and-infrastructure layer of legal, you’re not building a productivity widget; you’re touching the systems that determine rights, obligations, and risk for institutions and people. That comes with a different level of responsibility.”  

“Practically, it means a few things," ElCharif continued. "First, decide early whether you are a tool or infrastructure. Infrastructure is harder as it demands deep domain understanding, integration into core workflows, and a serious approach to security, observability, and governance. However, if you get it right, you become part of the backbone of how organizations operate, not just this year’s AI experiment.” 

ElCharif also stressed the importance of learning from practitioners who work directly with regulatory constraints. “Spend as much time as you can with the people who live this reality every day, from regulators and general counsels (GCs) to compliance officers and partners at law firms," he said. "Their constraints and anxieties should shape your roadmap. In our experience, you build more trust by being clear about what should never be automated, where humans must stay in the loop, and how your system can be audited and overridden, than by promising full autonomy.”  

Next, ElCharif pointed to the importance of anchoring AI-driven legaltech solutions in both sovereignty and context. “In regions like MENAT, questions of data residency, professional secrecy, and alignment with national visions are not marketing slogans; they are existential," ElCharif said. "If you can’t explain exactly where data sits, how agents are governed, and how your platform adapts to local law, you will struggle to earn a seat in the core stack. Finally, remember that your job is not to replace legal experts, but to give them better infrastructure so they can focus on the hard problems while the system handles the repetitive work, safely and at scale.” 

Pictured in the lead image is Qadi's founder Mohamad ElCharif. Image courtesy Qadi.