Think, a Saudi Arabian AI infrastructure startup based in Riyadh, raised more than $8m in a pre-seed round announced on 15 July 2026. RAED Ventures and Wa'ed Ventures, which is owned by Aramco, co-led the round.
The venture arm of Dhahran Techno Valley and strategic angel investors, whom the company did not name, also took part. Think describes the round as the largest AI infrastructure and deeptech pre-seed in MENA to date, a claim made in its press release as reported by Wamda. No valuation was disclosed.
“AI infrastructure today is expensive, inefficient, and increasingly difficult to scale.”Ahmed AlSharif, CEO, Think
What Think does
Think pairs its own hardware with software. Its AI Node is a high-density, liquid-cooled multi-GPU compute unit, and ILM is an orchestration layer meant to get more work out of each GPU and lower the cost of running AI models. Middle East AI News said ILM allocates workloads across GPUs using live thermal and memory data, and listed other products including a compute unit it calls the AI SuperNode, which it says delivers 135% more power density than comparable enterprise servers using the same silicon.
The system runs on widely available GPUs, and the company plans support for mixed-vendor and specialist inference chips. Middle East AI News said four patents are pending.
The company's performance claims are its own and unverified: GPU utilisation above 90% in production benchmarks, against an industry average of 30% to 50%, and a cost per million tokens almost ten times lower than the average cost of frontier models from Google, OpenAI and Anthropic.
Founders and traction
Ahmed AlSharif is chief executive and previously held senior roles at Meta, Sony PlayStation Europe and EA Games. Co-founder Ammar Enaya held leadership roles at Cisco, HPE Aruba and Vectra AI. The company was founded in 2025.
Think said it has run several proofs of concept and production deployments, and has signed strategic partnerships, in Saudi Arabia. Enaya said demand is strong from enterprises, start-ups and government organisations. Headcount was not disclosed.
What the money is for
The company will use the funds to expand its team, scale manufacturing and speed up product development. It plans to support deployments across Saudi Arabia, the wider Gulf Cooperation Council region and selected international markets over the next 18 months, and to develop ILM as a standalone software platform.
Wael Nafee of RAED Ventures said the team is building a category-defining company from Saudi Arabia with global potential. Wa'ed Ventures chief executive Anas Algahtani said Saudi Arabia has an opportunity not only to adopt AI but to build the infrastructure that powers it.
Investor comments
Faizan Baig, chief investment officer at Dhahran Techno Valley, said sovereign and efficient AI infrastructure is foundational to every country's AI ambitions. Middle East AI News said Think is engaged with the national AI company HUMAIN; Wamda said the company participates in the kingdom's AI ecosystem alongside initiatives such as HUMAIN, without naming it as a customer.
The company said customers can expect returns within 12 months, the article reported, as an alternative to recurring cloud costs paid to foreign providers.
Company website: think-ai.com