Ayan, a Dubai-based start-up that tracks how AI assistants describe brands to shoppers, has raised Dh2.2 million (about $599,000) in pre-seed funding from what it called strategic global business angels, according to a company statement published on October 19, 2026. The company said it will use the money to expand beyond the Middle East and North Africa.
Ayan did not name its individual investors or disclose a valuation. Founder Pablo Charron unveiled the round at the Sharjah Investment Forum, according to Dealroom and Qojo Media.
What the company does
Ayan, which trades as AYAN Labs, is built on the idea that many shoppers now ask an AI assistant which product to buy before they visit a store or a brand’s website. The answers they get are written by the model, not by the brand. Ayan’s platform reads what models including ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude say about a brand, compares those answers with the brand’s own positioning and flags where they differ.
The company says it then turns those gaps into tasks for the teams that own them: page edits for web teams, corrected copy for retail and aligned answers for sales and customer care staff, including briefs delivered to advisors on WhatsApp. It also offers brands a way to serve their product information directly to AI agents through the Model Context Protocol. It then measures whether the AI answers changed, and questions customers ask in store are fed back into the next round of fixes.
Ayan sells the service as a retained engagement sized to each brand rather than as a software license, according to its website, which says it reads 1.5 million AI answers every week.
The founders
AYAN Labs was founded in Dubai in 2025, according to its website. Pablo Charron is founder and chief executive. Qojo Media reported that Charron is French and moved to the UAE a few years ago to build the company. He co-founded Ayan with Chakir El Messaoudi, its chief growth officer.
“There’s a version of your brand you’ve never read. It’s the only one your customers meet,” Charron said in the statement carried by Zawya. El Messaoudi said in the same statement that sales advisors used to be the first expert a customer met and are now the second. “Our job is to make sure they are the better-informed one,” he said.
Funding and backers
Alongside the round, Ayan appointed Vincent Carvalho, chief growth officer of the M&A group at software company IFS and its former president for Asia-Pacific, Japan, the Middle East and Africa, as a founding board member. Christian Pedersen, group chief executive of Cegid and a former chief product officer at IFS and SAP, joined as an adviser.
Traction and market
Ayan says it serves more than 50 brands across the Middle East and North Africa, Europe and North America. In one deployment with a prestige beauty brand across five Gulf markets, advisors’ daily use of Ayan’s brief rose fourfold in 13 weeks, and those advisors now win four in 10 shoppers who arrive already influenced by AI, Dealroom and Qojo Media reported. The company has not published revenue figures.
The company is entering a well-funded part of the regional market. AI and AI-enabled companies in the Middle East and North Africa raised $678 million in the first half of 2026, up 81% from a year earlier, with the UAE accounting for 93% of the total, according to data platform MAGNiTT figures cited in the statement.
What’s next
Ayan said the pre-seed money will fund its expansion beyond the Middle East and North Africa as it scales the platform globally from its Dubai base. Its website says it is hiring.
This series earlier profiled Popcorn AI Studio, the Dubai-based Arabic-first AI video platform, and Vitalls, the Abu Dhabi-based digital health passport company.
