Most of us aren’t sure what we want to do with our lives when we are 22, but that’s certainly not the case with Maryam Al Abbar.
The young Emirati entrepreneur has already opened her own start-up in Silicon Valley and has no plans to stop there.
Ms Al Abbar, who runs the AI-driven carbon footprint calculation firm Carbon2Capital and ReachLLM, an AI platform that helps businesses understand and improve their visibility across large language models, puts her success down to her background as an Emirati woman.
She was speaking to The National to mark Emirati Women's Day, which takes place each year on August 28 but was extended to an entire month in 2026.
“One thing which I learnt from my mother is don’t be afraid to try,” Ms Al Abbar said. “If you don’t try, you don’t know if it would work or if it wouldn’t.”
Her mother, however, imposed something of a deadline.
“She kind of gave me a timeline of two years,” Ms Al Abbar said. “If you don’t figure out something by two years, I think we should call it quits and get a job.”
Global challenge
Her journey into entrepreneurship began before she graduated from Zayed University in Dubai.
It was there that she met the students who would become her co-founders when they entered the Bloomberg Challenge, an investment competition that allowed them to experiment with virtual money.
The experience revealed how differently the friends approached risk.
“You could kind of see the dynamic of these three friends and how we would work together,” she said.
That relationship developed into their first start-up, Carbon2Capital.
Carbon2Capital took the team into several start-up programmes, including Dubai SME, where they began applying what they had learnt at university to building a company.
The other three co-founders come from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Brazil.
“Carbon2Capital was our first baby,” she said.
Their work eventually took them to the UK after the team was selected for an international start-up programme, where they lived and worked alongside founders, mentors and venture capitalists.
It was during this period that the foundations of their next venture began to emerge.
The team shifted its attention to ReachLLM, an AI platform that helps businesses understand and improve their visibility across large language models.
Building in Silicon Valley
The founders’ ambitions took Ms Al Abbar to Silicon Valley, where the team was accepted into Founders Inc.
She said the company’s annual recurring revenue grew sharply during its first weeks there and ultimately exceeded the team’s expectations.
But Silicon Valley also forced the young Emirati to become comfortable walking into rooms where almost nobody looked like her.
“I think I was beyond blessed to be Emirati and a woman,” she said. “At the beginning, it does feel like a drawback because you feel like, ‘I am out of place.’
“You kind of have to build that courage of going ahead and introducing yourself.”
There are still moments when she questions whether she belongs, particularly when sitting opposite investors and senior executives who have spent decades building their careers.
“Sometimes you’re in a room where you feel small,” she said. “I’m sitting across people that are way up the ranks, have worked their whole lives, and they’re big decision-makers. And we’re sitting in the same meeting.”
Her co-founders remind her to see the situation differently.
“It took you this short amount of time to be in the same room that they’re in,” they tell her.
“I am 22,” she said.
Being a young female founder has also meant being underestimated.
Ms Al Abbar remembers a meeting in which she and another female co-founder presented their ambitions to an investor.
“You guys are too romantic,” he told them.
Ms Al Abbar questioned why two women outlining an ambitious vision – and explaining how they intended to achieve it – should be considered unrealistic. The encounter strengthened rather than diminished her determination.
‘Have the audacity to dare’
For Ms Al Abbar, building on that foundation means aiming for something that remains rare.
During her time in Silicon Valley, she searched for other Emirati founders who had followed a similar path and found relatively few.
“We are a very small population, but the things that we have done in the short amount of time and the small number of people that we have surpasses so many different countries,” she said.
“There are so many different dreams that we have achieved.”
The next dream is seeing an Emirati entrepreneur create a billion-dollar technology company capable of competing internationally.
It does not necessarily have to be her. But she wants somebody to break that barrier – and would particularly like to see an Emirati woman do it.
Her message to the generation coming behind her is also the philosophy that has taken her from a university investment challenge to Silicon Valley and back home at 22.
“Have the audacity to dare,” Ms Al Abbar said. “You are worth so much more than what you think. You need to have the audacity to walk into the room and tell them what you feel, or tell them what you’re building.”
But first, she said, you have to try. “If you don’t try, you don’t know if it would work or if it wouldn’t.”
More Emirati women entering technology
Shamma Al Blooshi has watched a growing number of young Emiratis make the leap into entrepreneurship.
As part of Hub71’s value creation team, she leads government partnerships, connecting start-ups with government bodies and regulators and helping founders navigate licensing, policy and other requirements.
Ms Al Blooshi previously worked at the Ministry of Industry and Advanced Technology, where she developed an interest in industry and technology before moving from supporting larger manufacturers to working with start-ups.
What particularly excites her is the growing number of Emirati women entering technology.
While female entrepreneurs have traditionally been highly visible in sectors such as food and beverage and retail, technology remains a more specialised field.
“I love that we have more Emirati women in this sector now,” Ms Al Blooshi said.
