When Afra Al Ahbabi, 18, visited a doctor, she expected to leave with a prescription. Instead, she left with a business idea.
The doctor told her she had gone into medicine to treat patients, yet much of every consultation was spent typing notes, translating conversations from Arabic into English, assigning medical codes and preparing insurance paperwork.
“I couldn’t forget that,” Ms Al Ahbabi said.
Within months, she had founded NABDH Technologies, an artificial intelligence platform designed to remove much of that administrative burden.
The system listens to consultations in both Arabic and English, automatically prepares clinical notes and completes insurance documents, while the doctor focuses on the patient rather than the computer screen.
She is one of a new wave of enterprising Emiratis being given a platform for success by Hub71, a global tech ecosystem in Abu Dhabi designed to help start-ups thrive.
Another young Emirati had a different idea. “People used to say, ‘Let me Google this.’ Now they say, ‘Let me ChatGPT this',” said Maryam Alabbar, 22.
That simple observation led to ReachLLM, a company helping businesses improve how they appear when people ask questions through artificial intelligence platforms such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity.
Ms Alabbar helps companies to improve their visibility across large language models. That journey took her to start-up accelerators in London and competitions in Japan.
But coming home from San Francisco proved to be a turning point for Ms Alabbar.
"Silicon Valley may be the world’s best-known start-up ecosystem but it is also crowded," she said. "There was so much noise.”
For Abdalla Al Ghafeli, 35, the journey started in a laboratory.
After graduating from UCLA, he returned to the UAE, determined to help the environment by creating technology that converts methane into clean hydrogen and captures the carbon as valuable materials such as graphite and graphene, rather than releasing it as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
His start-up, StarVolta, is finding cleaner ways to produce energy while making materials with commercial value.
These three represent a new generation of Emirati entrepreneurs. They are among 17 founders selected for the inaugural MZN Hub71 programme, launched by the Khalifa Fund for Enterprise Development in partnership with Hub71.
The programme supports Emiratis, chosen from more than 370 applications, in the earliest stages of building technology companies.
By far, most of the founders are under the age of 35, and more than three-quarters are building their first venture, in sectors including HealthTech, ClimateTech, FinTech, AgriTech and AI.
For Ahmad Ali Alwan, chief executive of Hub71, this is the future the UAE has been preparing for.
“Our mission is to enable and grow technology start-ups out of Abu Dhabi, from ideation all the way to scale,” Mr Alwan said.
Since it was launched in 2019, Hub71 has supported more than 400 start-ups, forged more than 200 partnerships, and included founders of more than 60 nationalities.
Mr Alwan says the country’s technology ambitions did not begin with today’s AI boom.
“If I go back to 2017, we were among the first countries in the world to establish a Ministry of Artificial Intelligence,” he said.
Mr Alwan cites institutions such as the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence and organisations including G42, MGX and Mubadala as evidence that the UAE has spent years laying the foundations for an innovation economy.
“We’re trying to unlock the value Abu Dhabi is deploying into technology and turn that into opportunities for our startup ecosystem,” he said.
Mr Alwan sees start-ups as not simply small businesses. They are part of how the UAE diversifies its economy and builds industries for the future.
“We’re especially looking into the future,” he said. “Technology will transform the economy.”
Founders, he believes, increasingly recognise this. When people ask why start-ups are choosing Abu Dhabi, Mr Alwan says the answer goes far beyond tax incentives.
“People often mention tax,” he said. “Actually, it comes later. It’s the geoeconomic relationships. It’s the vision the leadership has around the importance of technology and diversifying the economy. Then you couple that with institutions that shape that vision into reality."
Obsessions
Mr Alwan says successful founders tend to share the same qualities, regardless of their industry.
“You have to be obsessed with the idea,” he said. "You have to really believe it’s only you who can do it.”
The wider ecosystem is gaining international recognition. According to Startup Genome’s 2026 Global Startup Ecosystem Report, Abu Dhabi entered the world’s top 50 emerging start-up ecosystems for the first time this year, ranking between 41st and 50th globally.
The report estimates that the emirate generated $73.4 billion in value between July 2023 and December 2025, and ranks it among the strongest ecosystems in the region for artificial intelligence, research and development, funding momentum and talent.
But Mr Alwan says rankings are only one measure of progress: “What we’d like to create is an environment where any start-up can grow and scale."
