Technology
MENA Gaming Industry gets a boost with USD 1.5 Million Angel Investment for GameCentric
 
																								
												
												
											GameCentric has raised USD 1.5 Million (AED 6 Million) in capital from a Dubai-based Angel Investor, Bilal Merchant. The platform went live on December 1st 2023, right after the funding round.
This strategic capital injection, positions GameCentric to enhance its platform features to extend its footprint beyond the GCC & MENA region, and redefine the gaming experience for players everywhere.
Strategic Vision and Meticulous Execution Lead to Angel Investment
The opportunity for angel investment arose from GameCentric’s clear and compelling vision, executed with precision. Founded by the savvy entrepreneur Saad Khan, a veteran in the gaming industry with a shared passion to transform the industry, GameCentric embarked on its journey in 2023.
Saad Khan, CEO of GameCentric, stated, “Crafting a robust vision for our platform, supported by a sound business model and a seasoned management team, resonated with the angel investor, like Bilal Merchant who recognized the immense potential within GameCentric, which drove his decision to invest. Our aspiration is not just to be a gaming platform but a cultural phenomenon transcending borders. Collaboration with industry leaders, community-driven programs and an unwavering commitment to have the best user experience drives all of our future initiatives.”
Evolution into a WEB3 platform
In line with its vision, GameCentric is set to integrate cutting-edge technologies to remain competitive but also create new compelling propositions for brands, game publishers and gamers. In the coming years, GameCentric will transition to be a web3 digitally native platform & bring in digital assets play including cryptocurrencies by 2025. These milestones represent GameCentric’s commitment to forging a unique identity in the gaming industry, providing consumers with distinct and unparalleled experiences.
A 3X growth trajectory
As part of its launch strategy and to deliver an exceptional gaming experience, GameCentric has partnered with POWReSports, renowned for its role in brand activations and influencer management campaigns in KSA to give a boost to its gamer acquisition strategy. This collaboration will help solidify the expansion of GameCentrics’ ecosystem offering across the regional gaming landscape.
The business is currently gearing up for an aggressive growth and market expansion plan over the next two years. During this period, GameCentric aims to triple its user base across the region, with the MENA region projected to touch 88 Million gamers by 2026; and more than double its array of game titles, encompassing both web2 and web3 genres. This initiative not only offers an expanded gaming experience for users but also creates a diverse spectrum of opportunities for brands to pioneer innovative customer engagement tactics.
This initiative is poised to strengthen GameCentric’s market position, solidifying the company as a dominant force in the ever-evolving landscapes of gaming and customer loyalty. Stakeholders can expect a compelling value proposition as GameCentric navigates through this thrilling phase of expansion, unlocking unparalleled opportunities for both gamers and collaborating brands.
Bilal Merchant, an experienced businessman/investor with a demonstrated history of working in the oil and energy industry, stated “GameCentric’s visionary strategy in seamlessly connecting brands with gamers, coupled with their unwavering commitment to integrating cutting-edge technologies such as crypto and Web3, has left an indelible impression on me. Their innovative approach positions them as disruptors in the gaming landscape, poised to create a distinctive and rewarding experience for players worldwide.”
Supporting their big moves, GameCentric has garnered support from industry heavyweights such as LIV, UAE’s first & largest digital bank powered by Emirates NBD. As part of their new brand identity aimed at targeting Generation Now, LIV has recognized the platform’s potential to deliver on their banking & financial education objectives through the art of gaming. These endorsements underscore the credibility and innovation that GameCentric brings to the gaming community across the region.
The platform is gearing up for strategic enhancements in line with their vision to integrate modern technology. The enhancements will be overseen by expert crypto advisors, with a focus on innovation. The new features will include a dynamic loyalty program centered on a Web3 wallet and GameCentric tokens, aimed at delivering enhanced user value.
GameCentric aims to be a platform where gamers can earn, learn, and engage as part of a diverse global community. As the platform evolves into a Web3 environment, users will have the opportunity to become token owners, marking a significant shift in the gaming experience.
Future plans and expansions
This strategic angel investment acts as a catalyst for GameCentric’s ambitious growth strategy, facilitating future fundraising rounds and establishing the platform as a dominant force in the global gaming scene.
In the near future initiatives will include collaborations with renowned game publishers and the development of community-driven programs to strengthen engagement on the platform. In addition, GameCentric is also focussed on building a strong B2B2C brand engagement play thereby getting brands to create a differentiated customer offering & hence more opportunities for customer engagement that will foster long-term brand loyalty.
Tech News
New Rubrik Agent Cloud Accelerates Trusted Enterprise AI Agent Deployments
 
														AI agents represent the biggest opportunity and the biggest threat to organizations everywhere. Rubrik, Inc., the Security and AI Operations Company, today announced the launch of the Rubrik Agent Cloud to accelerate enterprise AI agent adoption while managing risk of AI deployments.
AI transformation is now mandatory for most organizations. However, IT leaders are constrained because Agentic AI has significant risks including hallucination as well as compromise by threat actors. Rubrik Agent Cloud is designed to monitor and audit agentic actions, enforce real-time guardrails for agentic changes, fine-tune agents for accuracy and, finally, undo agent mistakes. Built on the Rubrik Platform that uniquely combines data, identity and application contexts, Rubrik Agent Cloud gives customers security, accuracy, and efficiency as they transform their organizations into AI enterprises.
“IT and security leaders often don’t know what their AI agents are doing or how to undo their mistakes. Rubrik wants to help them answer: ‘What agents do I have?’ ‘What are they capable of doing?’ ‘How are they performing?’ ‘What did they do?’ and ‘Can I undo that when they screw up?’ said Bipul Sinha, CEO, Chairman, and Co-Founder of Rubrik. “AI agents have the potential to cause 10x the damage in 1/10 of the time. With Rubrik Agent Cloud, we uniquely address this challenge by leveraging our leadership in data, identity, and resilience to help our customers deploy AI agents with peace of mind.”
Accelerate Enterprise AI Deployment and Resilience
Rubrik Agent Cloud will offer comprehensive agent management capabilities that encompass the entire AI agent lifecycle – from observability and control to performance management and simulation.
- Agent Monitor:
- Auto-discovers both infrastructure-as-a-service (Azure/AWS) agents as well as platform-as-a-service (M365/AgentForce) agents.
 
○ Automatically discovers and maps active agents across popular agent builders such as OpenAI, Microsoft Copilot Studio, Amazon Bedrock and other popular agent building tools.
○ Continuously monitors agent activity and data access, and maintains immutable audit trails capturing context from data, identity, and applications.
- Agent Govern:
- Tracks agent usage, evaluates performance against prompts, and gives teams the tools to control destructive/undesired actions.
 
○ Defines and enforces agent behavior, access, and action policies in real-time.
○ A centralized tool to provide integration with enterprise identity systems—helping ensure secure, compliant, and controlled innovation.
- Agent Remediate:
- Announced in August 2025, Agent Rewind integrates with Rubrik Security Cloud to provide the industry’s only solution for precise time and blast radius rollback of undesirable or destructive actions.
 
○ Goes beyond observability to allow organizations to instantly undo unwanted or destructive actions, without any downtime or data loss.
○ Selective rollback of agent-driven changes ensures continuous protection for critical data and systems, and immutable recovery.
Tech Features
Yango Tech: Four Game-Changing Tools Revolutionising Retail Operations
 
														Consumer demand in the Middle East is rising fast, driven by omnichannel shopping habits and the expectation of speed and accuracy. AI-powered automation has become essential for retailers to keep up. McKinsey projects AI contribute up to $150 billion to GCC economies by 2030, while the UAE’s retail sector is forecast to reach $74.87 billion by 2028. Yango Tech has outlined four key tools retailers can use to succeed in this environment.
1. AI Agents
AI agents are transforming retail with several capabilities. On the front end, they deliver contextually relevant recommendations in real time, tailoring offers based on location, cultural moments, or the weather, while conversational AI enriches the journey with human-like assistance in native languages. They also harness predictive capabilities by analysing unstructured data, from social media to past purchase behaviour, to anticipate shifts in demand and refine pricing or promotional strategies. Ahead of Eid Al-Adha, for instance, they might spotlight premium meat cuts or traditional Arabic sweets, helping retailers unlock revenue increases of 10–15%.
Beyond customer-facing roles, AI agents drive efficiency behind the scenes. Procurement agents compose RFPs, compare vendor offers, and execute sourcing decisions directly in procurement systems, saving up to 80% of manual effort. Replenishment agents forecast inventory gaps, adjust orders dynamically, and use computer vision to redistribute stock or reroute deliveries, boosting accuracy to 95% and cutting waste. Content management agents accelerate time-to-listing by auto-generating product cards, adapting content to trends, and ensuring consistency across markets. Pricing agents track competitor SKUs and demand elasticity in real time, optimising promotions and delivery fees to protect margins while sustaining competitiveness.
2. Smart Price Tags
Price intelligence has become crucial for staying competitive with today’s informed and price-sensitive shoppers. Dynamic pricing algorithms can review millions of products in minutes, optimising strategies at a speed human decision-making cannot match. By applying ML to track competitor pricing, market trends, and demand elasticity, retailers can adjust prices in real time, boosting gross merchandise value by up to 20%. These systems also factor in seasonal shifts, fluctuating supply costs, and product shelf life, while surge pricing AI manages delivery fees or order values during peak periods to protect margins. Digital twin technology strengthens this further by creating virtual replicas of stores, streaming data from sensors and cameras into pricing systems. This real-time visibility into shelves and product movement ensures that pricing decisions are tied directly to availability, enabling retailers to reduce waste, streamline operations, and maintain customer trust while driving profitability.
3. Computer Vision
Computer vision (CV) is redefining how retailers manage store layouts and product assortments by moving beyond static, manually updated plans. Instead of relying only on historical sales data, AI agents equipped with CV analyse real-time customer traffic and interactions to continuously optimize shelf arrangements and product placement. This creates store environments that adapt dynamically to shopper behaviour, boosting sales and improving the overall experience. CV also provides granular insights into store-specific conditions, from equipment to layout constraints, enabling smarter decisions. Beyond the shop floor, warehouses use CV to monitor dispatch accuracy, logistics teams track the condition of trucks in transit, and managers can oversee staff performance in real time. Paired with augmented reality, the technology also delivers richer customer engagement, allowing shoppers to virtually try on clothes or visualize furniture directly in their homes.

4. Robotic automation
Robotics is moving from concept to necessity in retail. In warehouses, robotic pickers trained through behavioural cloning by human experts and thousands of real-world warehouse scenarios reach up to 95% picking accuracy. With the repetitive warehouse tasks taken over, staff can focus on higher-value work and boost productivity.
Autonomous delivery robots are also emerging as practical solutions for dense urban areas. Equipped with high-precision navigation, they operate 24/7 and cut emissions compared to traditional vehicles. They complement existing fleets by reaching locations where larger vehicles cannot, supporting zero-emission urban logistics. As battery technology and urban infrastructure advance, their role in retail operations will continue to expand.
Tech News
UAE’s AI market set to soar to Dh170 billion by 2030, driving MENA’s Dh610 billion Artificial Intelligence boom
 
														The UAE’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) market is forecast to hit Dh170 billion (USD 46.33 billion) by 2030, according to new data from Grand View Research (GVR) in a study that underscores the country’s accelerating dominance in the region’s USD 166 billion (Dh610 billion) AI boom.
Close on the heels of the UAE unveiling its first Arabic-language AI model earlier this year, the new research by the California headquartered- firm reveals that the MENA AI market, valued at USD 11.92 billion (Dh43.7 billion) in 2023, is set to expand almost fifteen-fold to USD 166.33 billion (Dh610 billion) by 2030, growing at an annual rate of 44.8 percent.
“The Middle East, and especially the UAE, is no longer just an adopter of global AI technologies – it’s, in fact, shaping its own playbook,” said Swayam Dash, Managing Director at Grand View Research. “With sovereign funds backing innovation, and policies like the UAE’s new Strategic Plan 2031 leading the way with focus on utilising artificial intellegence in achieving greater financial efficiency for the federal government, the region is becoming a laboratory for how AI can drive both governance and growth.”
GVR’s report further highlights that nearly three in four UAE companies have maintained or increased their AI investments in the past year. Machine learning and deep learning remain the backbone of this transformation, particularly in healthcare, logistics, and financial services.
According to the report, the AI in Healthcare market in the Middle East and Africa, valued at USD 193.1 million (Dh 709 million) in 2023, is projected to reach USD 1.47 billion (Dh 5.39 billion) by 2030 growing at a CAGR of 33.6 per cent, while the region’s legal AI sector – currently at USD 43.3 million (Dh 159 million) – is expected to almost triple to USD 121.5 million (Dh 446 million) at a CAGR of 18 per cent over the same period.
“The release of region-specific AI metrics for the first time quantifies what many have sensed – that the UAE and its neighbours are at the tipping point of a generational transformation,” Dash added. “And the next wave of opportunity will come from specialisation. Sectors like healthcare and legal technology are still emerging here and hence the potential is immense. With the AI in regional healthcare market alone projected to touch USD 8.39 billion (AED 30.8 billion) by 2033, we’re looking at a decade of exponential growth. Likewise, the legal AI space, though currently small, represents a first-mover opportunity in digitising governance, compliance, and regulatory frameworks – areas where the Middle East can define its own benchmarks rather than follow global ones.”
The study also notes how the MENA region is further emerging stronger as one of the world’s most dynamic AI frontiers driven particularly by government-led digital transformation agendas, rapid urbanisation, and the rollout of AI-enabling technologies such as 5G, cloud, and IoT,
“Machine learning and deep learning continue to dominate adoption across smart-city initiatives, healthcare, and urban management – with the UAE leading the charge in real-world integration,” said Dash.
The full Grand View Research MENA AI Market Report offers an in-depth analysis of these evolving trends, uncovering how data, policy, and innovation are converging to redefine the region’s digital economy.
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