Ayan, a Dubai startup that builds AI software to track how AI assistants describe brands to shoppers, has raised AED 2.2m (about $0.6m) in pre-seed funding. The round was reported on 19 October 2026 by Middle East AI News and The Startup Scene; the company's press release, published on Zawya, carries no date.
The money came from what the company called strategic global business angels. None of the investors was named, no lead was identified and no valuation was disclosed.
Alongside the funding, Ayan named Vincent Carvalho as a founding board member and Christian Pedersen as an adviser. The company said it will use the money to expand beyond the Middle East and North Africa.
“There's a version of your brand you've never read. It's the only one your customers meet.”Pablo Charron, Founder and CEO, Ayan
What Ayan does
Ayan's starting point is that shoppers now often ask an AI assistant about a product before they speak to a brand or a salesperson. Its platform records what AI tools say about a brand and compares those answers with how the brand wants to be positioned.
It then acts on the gaps in the places where sales happen: product pages, campaigns before they launch and the phones of in-store sales advisers. The platform measures how each change affects later AI answers, and questions customers ask at the counter are fed back in as the next issues to address. Ayan says this sets it apart from AI visibility tools, which stop at reporting on a screen, and from clienteling tools used by shop staff, which do not track what AI has already told a customer.
"There's a version of your brand you've never read. It's the only one your customers meet," said founder and chief executive Pablo Charron. He added that this version is already deciding which brands get recommended.
Founders, board and traction
Charron founded the company and runs it as chief executive. Chakir El Messaoudi is co-founder and chief growth officer. El Messaoudi said the sales adviser used to be the first expert a customer met and is now the second, and that Ayan's job is to make sure advisers are the better informed of the two.
Carvalho is chief growth officer of the M&A group at IFS and previously ran its business in Asia-Pacific, Japan, the Middle East and Africa. He said brands are losing the first conversation with their customers to AI, often without knowing it. Pedersen is group chief executive of Cegid and a former chief product officer at IFS and SAP. He said front-office systems were designed for customers who speak to the brand first, whereas customers now speak to AI first.
Ayan says it serves more than 50 brands across the Middle East and North Africa, Europe and North America, and that it has analysed millions of data points on how AI describes brands. These figures come from the company and have not been independently verified. Ayan has not disclosed revenue, headcount, the year it was founded or any earlier funding.
AI funding in the region
The release cites data from MAGNiTT showing that AI and AI-enabled companies in the Middle East and North Africa raised $678m in the first half of 2026, up 81% from a year earlier, with UAE-based companies taking 93% of that total.
Middle East AI News added further detail from the same MAGNiTT review: AI accounted for half of regional venture funding in the period, up from 22% a year before, while the number of AI deals fell from 121 to 53 as money concentrated in rounds of $20m or more. The release also noted that the UAE Cabinet approved a plan in April to run half of government services on agentic AI within two years.
Company website: ayanlabs.ai