A modest share of the billions: how five firms capture GITEX seats despite a funding gap
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The Tai Dubai network announced the names of five women entrepreneurs who won the regional qualifiers of the Tai Women MENA 2026 programme, enabling their companies to qualify for the final competition scheduled for next December as part of GITEX Global 2026.
The announcement followed a series of virtual regional qualifiers held from September 8 to 17, in which organisations from various geographic tracks competed. The Qatari track was led by Najlaa Mohamed, co-founder of B-Vita in Egypt, Lia Maawad, co-founder and CEO of Maison Safqa in Saudi Arabia, and Anusha Iqbal, co-founder and CEO of Qanuni AI in the United Arab Emirates. Roan Alawi, CEO of Tres, won the track covering the rest of the Middle East and North Africa, while Aisha Al-Yasi, founder and brand director of Scalab, topped the Emirati track.
The seventh edition attracted more than 250 women-founded licensed companies, marking growth compared with roughly 200 companies in the 2025 edition. A shortlist of 228 organisations was selected, from which 46 entrepreneurs qualified to pitch in the regional qualifiers before judging panels that included representatives from venture capital, technology and banking sectors, with one winner and two runners-up allocated to each track.
The tracks featured a notable presence of artificial-intelligence solutions, software-as-a-service, and agricultural, food, health and sustainability technologies. The projects demonstrated AI applications in legal services, construction, livestock health and prenatal care, while sustainability solutions focused on converting agricultural waste into fertilizer, recycling textile fibres, and deploying smart sensors that achieve water-use savings of between 30 and 45 percent in water-scarce environments.
These projects are competing regionally against a sharp funding gap revealed by venture-capital figures for the first half of 2026.
While start-ups in the region raised $150 million across 27 deals in April alone, women-founded companies secured no more than $2.5 million throughout the first half of the year, representing just 0.14 percent of total venture capital of $1.7 billion in the Middle East and North Africa. The Expand North Star platform at GITEX gives the winners a dedicated stage to showcase their businesses directly to investors to address this capital bottleneck, following a qualifying track that allowed the programme to support over a thousand women-led companies and award 380,000 AED in non-equity prizes over four years.
This challenge goes beyond a celebratory competition, reshaping founding economics in Gulf and Egyptian markets, where the lower level of venture funding for women-founded firms forces a shift toward business models that rely on rapid cash flows and demonstrate direct operational viability for the client without waiting for traditional investment rounds. For companies operating in specialised AI sectors, such as legal platforms in Dubai or agricultural technologies in Cairo, proving tangible reductions in operating costs becomes the sole ticket to persuade investment committees to move beyond cautious fund-raising and open the thin financing pathways at major exhibitions.