Ayan Raises AED 2.2M to Help Brands Navigate AI-Led Shopping
Ayan, a Dubai-based AI startup, has raised AED 2.2 million (about $600,000) in pre-seed funding from strategic global business angels.
The company was founded by Pablo Charron, its chief executive officer, and Chakir El Messaoudi, its chief growth officer.
The company is building an agentic platform that monitors how AI assistants describe products and businesses, then identifies gaps between those descriptions and a brand's intended positioning.
The platform connects these AI visibility insights with customer-facing channels, including product pages, marketing campaigns and tools used by sales advisers.
It then measures changes in AI-generated answers after those interventions, creating a continuous feedback loop. Ayan reports it already serves more than 50 brands across the Middle East and North Africa, Europe and North America.
The challenge Ayan addresses is structural. Consumers increasingly use AI assistants to compare products and obtain recommendations before visiting a retailer.
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A company may control its own website but have limited direct control over how third-party AI systems summarise its products or recommend competitors.
Ayan aims to make that layer of brand perception visible and actionable, linking what consumers encounter through AI with the information available to frontline sales teams.
The company plans to use the capital to accelerate expansion beyond MENA.
It also announced that Vincent Carvalho, chief growth officer for M&A Group at IFS, has joined as a founding board member, and Christian Pedersen, group chief executive officer at Cegid, has joined as an adviser.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed. The company did not name the individual funding participants or provide a country-by-country expansion timetable.
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