Saudi Arabia-based AI infrastructure startup Think has raised more than $8 million in a pre-seed funding round, co-led by RAED Ventures and Wa'ed Ventures, with participation from Dhahran Techno Valley's Venture Capital arm and strategic angel investors. The company describes it as the largest AI infrastructure and deeptech pre-seed round in MENA to date.
Founded in 2025 by Ahmed AlSharif — whose career spans senior roles at Meta, Sony PlayStation Europe and EA Games — and enterprise technology veteran Ammar Enaya, Think builds an integrated AI platform combining high-density, liquid-cooled multi-GPU hardware with proprietary bare-metal orchestration software.
The thesis is simple: let enterprises get more out of the GPUs they already have, rather than chasing bigger clusters. In production benchmarks, Think's platform delivered sustained GPU utilisation above 90%, against an industry norm of 30–50%, and a per-million-token cost nearly 10x lower than using frontier models from major hyperscalers — all on widely available hardware.
For international partners and investors watching the GCC, Think addresses a structural pain point as the region accelerates its sovereign AI ambitions. The company's integrated stack — deployable across data centres, edge environments and offices — offers an alternative to hyperscaler dependence at a moment when data sovereignty, cost control and compute efficiency are becoming hard requirements for enterprise and government buyers across the Gulf.
The round also signals that local venture capital, led by Aramco-backed Wa'ed Ventures and RAED Ventures, is willing to back deep infrastructure plays at the pre-seed stage, not just application-layer startups.
"AI infrastructure today is expensive, inefficient, and increasingly difficult to scale," said CEO Ahmed AlSharif. "Think exists to help organisations do more with the compute they already have, offering an alternative to the industry's current obsession with bigger, faster and more expensive."
Co-founder Ammar Enaya added: "We're seeing strong demand from enterprises, start-ups and government organisations looking for infrastructure that delivers the performance they need, with an approach that gives them total control and ownership."
The fresh capital will fund team expansion, manufacturing scale-up, product development, and deployments across Saudi Arabia, the wider GCC and selected international markets over the next 18 months.
