Stake, the MENA region’s leading digital real estate investment platform, and ACE & Company, a Swiss-headquartered global investment group focused on private markets, with more than $2.0 billion in assets under management, today announced a strategic partnership to support the development of liquidity solutions for investors in Stake products. The agreement will focus initially on the platform’s real estate portfolio in the UAE, held through Prescribed Companies, the equivalent of Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) in DIFC.

The initiative is intended to create a more liquid, transparent, and efficient marketplace for investors seeking exposure to fractional real estate opportunities through Stake’s platform. By combining Stake’s innovative access model with ACE & Company’s longstanding experience in private market investing and secondary transactions, the partnership aims to strengthen the investment ecosystem around fractional ownership structures in the UAE.

The joint venture reflects both firms’ confidence in the long-term fundamentals of the UAE. At a time of heightened regional uncertainty, the UAE continues to distinguish itself through economic resilience, political stability, high-quality infrastructure, and sustained global investor interest. These attributes have helped position the country as one of the region’s most compelling destinations for long-term real estate capital.

Through the planned secondary infrastructure framework, investors in Stake products are expected to benefit from greater flexibility in managing their holdings, improved visibility around market pricing, and clearer pathways to liquidity. In turn, the broader market stands to benefit from enhanced stability, stronger price discovery, and increased participation and confidence in fractional real estate as an investable asset class. The framework operates within Stake’s existing DFSA-approved regulatory permissions, providing investors with established oversight and regulatory clarity. Stake is regulated by the DFSA, the independent regulator for business conducted from or within DIFC.

For Stake, the partnership marks an important step in the continued evolution of its platform, extending beyond access to ownership and toward the development of more mature market infrastructure. For ACE & Company, the collaboration draws on its extensive experience in private equity and secondaries to help unlock liquidity solutions in a fast-growing segment of the alternative investment landscape. The DIFC’s established private markets framework, and its Prescribed Company regulations in particular, have been central to enabling this model, providing the institutional and legal infrastructure on which this secondary transfer facility innovation is built.

Manar Mahmassani, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Stake said:

“The UAE has always rewarded those who invest in it with conviction, and that’s exactly what this partnership represents. Stake was born in crisis. We launched during COVID, when global real estate markets were struggling and Dubai’s property industry was at its low point. What we saw was a market that is far from broken, but fundamentally sound, going through a temporary challenge. That conviction has never left us. Today, the world is watching the region, and we want to be unambiguous about where we stand: we are long Dubai, and we are long the UAE. This is not the moment to retreat: it’s the moment to build the institutional infrastructure this market deserves. That’s exactly what this partnership is all about – a mature, resilient market attracting institutional confidence and capital committed for the long run.”

Sherif El Halwagy, Partner and Co-Founder at ACE & Company said:

“Drawing on almost two decades of experience in offering liquidity to investors across private markets ecosystems via secondaries, we see a tremendous opportunity in real estate secondaries in the UAE. This partnership reflects our conviction in the country’s long-term fundamentals and our disciplined approach to capital deployment in high-quality assets. We look forward to further strengthening our relationships with investors and partners across the region.”

The partnership is designed to benefit all stakeholders across the ecosystem. Existing investors gain added optionality and transparency, prospective investors gain greater confidence in the structure, and the market benefits from stronger liquidity mechanisms, a scalable source of permanent/long-term capital and a more institutionalized framework for participation.

As fractional ownership continues to gain traction globally, Stake and ACE & Company believe that robust secondary infrastructure will play a critical role in supporting the sector’s long-term growth. The joint venture represents a shared commitment not only to product innovation, but also to building the underlying market architecture needed to support sustainable expansion in the UAE and beyond.

Construction companies across the UAE may be overlooking one of the most valuable outcomes of the country’s new R&D Tax Credit regime. Introduced under Ministerial Decision No. 24 of 2026 and effective from 1 January 2026, the framework offers credits of 15% to 50% on qualifying R&D expenditure. Yet, according to Dhruva, a Ryan Affiliate, many construction businesses have yet to identify the full extent of qualifying activity or put in place the processes required to claim these benefits.

As one of the UAE’s most economically significant sectors, construction is uniquely positioned to benefit from the regime. Innovation in this sector is continuous, spanning materials, construction methods, digital tools and safety systems but much of it has historically not been classified or documented as R&D.

“The construction sector innovates constantly, in materials, in methods, in software, in safety. The challenge is that much of this activity has never been labelled R&D, and therefore never documented as such. That is precisely where value is being left on the table. Companies that begin mapping their qualifying activities now, and build the evidence trail the regime demands, will be the ones positioned to capture this benefit when it matters most,” said Nimish Goel, Leader Middle East, Dhruva, Ryan LLC Affiliate.

To qualify under the regime, R&D activities must meet five criteria aligned with the OECD Frascati Manual: they must be novel, creative, uncertain in outcome, systematic, and transferable or reproducible. For construction businesses that approach innovation with defined objectives, structured experimentation and documented results, a wide range of activity meets this threshold.

In practice, qualifying activity in the construction sector can include the development of advanced materials such as low-carbon concrete and smart composites, experimentation with modular construction techniques and prefabrication systems, and proprietary software development for Building Information Modelling (BIM), digital twins and AI-driven project management. Sustainability innovation also qualifies, including net-zero building systems and passive cooling technologies suited to UAE conditions, as does the adoption of robotics and drone-based construction and inspection methods.

The critical distinction lies between routine construction activity and genuine R&D. Applying an established methodology to a new project does not qualify. Systematically resolving technical uncertainty through experimentation and documenting that process does.

A distinguishing feature of the UAE regime is its dual-threshold structure. Each credit tier requires businesses to meet both a minimum level of qualifying expenditure and a minimum average R&D headcount. The first AED 1 million of qualifying spend attracts a 15% credit with at least two R&D staff; spend between AED 1 million and AED 2 million qualifies for 35% with at least six staff; and spend between AED 2 million and AED 5 million attracts 50% with at least fourteen. Where headcount thresholds are not met, the applicable credit rate is reduced accordingly.

For construction companies, this makes workforce planning integral to tax strategy. Specialist roles including materials scientists, structural engineers working on novel challenges, proptech developers and robotics engineers not only drive innovation but also determine access to higher credit tiers. Staff costs additionally benefit from a 30% uplift in qualifying expenditure, further strengthening the case for building dedicated R&D capability.

“This is not just a tax incentive; it represents a structural shift in how innovation is recognised within the construction sector. Businesses that act early will not only benefit financially but also strengthen their long-term technical capabilities,” added Nimish.

The regime places significant emphasis on contemporaneous documentation and structured processes. Pre-approval from the relevant authority is mandatory, and businesses must maintain detailed technical records of R&D objectives, methodologies, experiments and outcomes for a period of seven years. For construction companies, this requires embedding R&D tracking into project workflows from the outset, rather than attempting to reconstruct evidence retrospectively.

Construction groups operating centralised engineering or shared technology platforms should also review their structures carefully. Intra-group transactions are excluded from qualifying expenditure, making it critical to ensure that R&D costs are appropriately allocated at the entity level.

“The UAE’s construction sector is building the physical infrastructure of a knowledge economy. It is fitting that those who innovate within it now have access to the same calibre of R&D incentive as their counterparts in technology or manufacturing. The question is not whether to engage, but how quickly companies can build the processes to do so effectively,” concluded Nimish.

MOZN, a leading enterprise AI company, today announced that it has been named among notable vendors in Forrester’s Financial Crime Management Solutions Landscape Q1 2026 report. This inclusion marks a significant milestone for MOZN and reinforces its position among global innovators.

The Forrester report, which lists 42 vendors, provides financial institutions with an overview of notable vendors and the key market dynamics shaping the rapidly evolving financial crime management (FCM) market, including fraud and anti-money laundering (AML) solutions.

MOZN was listed in the report with a geographic focus on Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) and the Asia-Pacific (APAC) regions, and an industry focus on financial services, government, and insurance. The recognition underscores the company’s sustained investment in AI-driven innovation and its focus on delivering scalable, future-ready financial crime solutions tailored to high-growth and complex regulatory markets.

At the center of this recognition is FOCAL, MOZN’s end-to-end financial crime management platform. Built on a unified FRAML (Fraud + AML) architecture, FOCAL leverages agentic AI to automate data integration, accelerate risk-scoring, and streamline alert triage, enhancing investigator productivity while preserving human judgment. The platform offers flexible deployment options, allowing organizations to modernize their operations in a way that aligns with their technical and regulatory needs.

“MOZN’s inclusion in Forrester’s report reflects the progress we have made in building technology that truly transforms how institutions combat financial crime,” said Dr. Mohammed Alhussein, Founder and CEO of MOZN. “As Saudi Arabia designates 2026 as the Year of Artificial Intelligence, it reinforces the Kingdom’s ambition to lead in shaping the future of AI globally. At MOZN, we are proud to contribute to this vision by engineering AI-native platforms that make financial crime prevention more proactive, precise, and effective. This milestone reflects both the momentum of our mission and the growing global relevance of technology built in the region.”

By combining deep regional expertise with global technology standards, MOZN continues to advance its purpose of empowering organizations with intelligence that matters. The company remains committed to delivering AI-native solutions purpose-built for the world’s most regulated and knowledge-intensive sectors, enabling institutions to operate with greater clarity, confidence, and control. As demand for advanced AI-driven capabilities accelerates worldwide, MOZN is expanding its global footprint, supporting organizations as they navigate an increasingly complex financial crime landscape.