#Saudi #funding - Saudi Arabia’s National Technology Sector Development Program (NTDP), yesterday launched a ‘Technology Growth Financing’ programme to provide loans and loan guarantees of up to SR15 million ($4m) for startups, small, and medium size technology businesses in the Kingdom. The NTDP was announced last week at #LaunchKSA. (Arab News)

#Qatar #funding - Qatar Science and Technology Park (QSTP) has invested in US-based Kanari AI‘s $475,000 in pre-Seed funding round. Founded in 2020, Kanari AI provides dialectal speech solutions, which tackles four main pain points of speech tech in the Arab world: poor accuracy, deployment concerns, lack of customisation, and complicated integration. (Wamda)

#UAE #4IR - Global tech accelerator Plug and Play is partnering with Abu Dhabi Investment Office (Adio) to create an industry 4.0 open innovation platform that aims to attract high calibre startups and encourage ambitious projects in the industrial sector. (The National)

#Jordan #education - Jordanian startup Unihance, a decentralized e-learning platform, is developing an AI virtual agent to provide users with career guidance, suggestions and recommendations on key educational paths. Unihance aims to be ‘the Uber’ of knowledge providers and allows specialists, instructors, universities, companies, and academies to create and then upload professional courses onto its platform. (Jordan News)

#India #UAE #startups - Signzy, an Indian #AI start-up specialising in banking workflow automation, has partnered with Dubai-based investment company Seed Group to enter the UAE market and expand its operations in the wider Middle East. (The National)

#UAE #transport - Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) aims to convert 5% of Dubai Taxi Corporation’s taxi fleet to driverless vehicles by 2023 and to operate 4,000 self-driving taxis by 2030. The RTA signed a deal with General Motors’ self-driving unit Cruise earlier this year to run its driverless Origin shuttles in Dubai. The initiative is Cruise’s first robotaxi deal outside of the USA. (Dubai Media Office)

#UAE #IoT - Netix Controls, a leading building automation and energy management technology company, has announced its global expansion and channel partner programme. According to the company, its ‘Brownfield Revolution’ event held last night at the Burj Khalifa video-streamed live to 20 countries. Netix uses its software platform and IoT devices enable digital transformation for buildings with both new and legacy infrastructure. (Gulf News)

#Kuwait #smartloans - Kuwait Credit Bank has announced the launch of an AI-powered smart home loan service. Kuwaiti citizens who have been allocated vouchers from the Public Corporation for Housing Welfare will be able to apply for construction loans through the bank’s new portal. (Arab Times)

#Saudi #robotics - The Saudi robotics team compete at the World Robotics Summit in Japan this month. The team qualified as one of the 16 teams, selected out of a total of 119 teams worldwide. Led by Nahid Sidki, PhD., CTO of RPDC Innovations, the Kingdom’s robotics team is sponsored by Aramco, NEOM, the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA), the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), and TAQNIA. (Arab News)

#UAE #research - The new provost of Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), Professor Fakhreddine Karray, outlined the institution’s strategy to Kelsey Warner for The National this week. Overall, he plans to help MBZUAI recruit a world-class faculty, produce research with commercial applications and promote an entrepreneurial culture among students. (The National)

#Egypt #USA #emotionAI - CNN talks to Egyptian-American computer scientist Rana el Kaliouby about technology’s ‘empathy crisis’ and her mission is to humanise it. Kaliouby co-founded emotion recognition startup Affectiva while studying for her Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). (CNN)

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