Bilal Abu Ghazaleh had just moved to London a few days before our visit and was splitting his time between London and Dubai.
After nearly a decade in the US, including a stint at Scale AI, he brings that experience to his next venture, 1001 AI. 1001 AI is a company that builds AI infrastructure for critical industries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
The startup recently raised $9 million in a seed round led by CIV, General Catalyst, and Lux Capital. Other backers include global and regional angels such as Chris Ré, Amjad Maead (Replit), Amira Sajwani (DAMAC), Khalid Bin Bader Al Saud (RAED Ventures), and Hisham Alfalih (Lean Technologies).
Abu Ghazaleh said the two-month-old company promises to reduce inefficiencies in high-stakes sectors such as aviation, logistics, and oil and gas through its AI-native operating system for decision-making.
“If you just look at the top three or four industries like airports, ports, construction, oil and gas, we see over $10 billion in inefficiencies in the Gulf region alone,” the founder and CEO said in an interview with TechCrunch. “This is unique to markets like the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Even without considering other sectors, these industries offer huge opportunities.”
For example, streamlining airport operations can lead to even greater savings, impacting both airports and airlines. Meanwhile, he said nine out of 10 of the region’s mega-projects are behind schedule or over budget, so even small efficiency gains could mean huge savings for these projects.
1001 AI hopes to sell its decision-making AI to new projects after its first product launch, expected by the end of the year. Abu Ghazaleh said the startup is in talks with some of the Gulf’s biggest construction companies and airports.
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Born and raised in Jordan, Abu Ghazaleh immigrated to the United States for college and then joined the Bay Area startup scene. After working in early product roles at computer vision startup Hive AI, he joined Scale AI in 2020 during the company’s rapid expansion. There, he worked his way up from operations associate to director of GenAI operations at the company, expanding the network of contributors responsible for annotating and labeling training data.
He was then scheduled to join Scale’s international public sector arm building AI solutions for foreign governments. But when Meta invested in Scale, the company pivoted and Abu-Ghazaleh left to found 1001 AI.
The Gulf region, particularly the UAE and Saudi Arabia, has become one of the most aggressive AI adopters in the world. From government-backed ventures like Abu Dhabi’s G42 to Saudi Arabia’s National Center for AI, governments are investing billions of dollars to build local AI infrastructure and attract global talent.
For Abu Ghazaleh, a combination of appetite, budget and urgency make this region the perfect testing ground. But unlike most AI startups that focus on software or enterprise tools, 1001 targets real-world, physical operations, and the company’s investors believe it has even greater potential in the Middle East.
“We’re very bullish on AI solving physical world problems at scale, like optimizing how airports direct planes, how ports move cargo, and how construction sites operate,” said Deena Shakir, partner at Lux Capital. “The MENA region has significant potential in this sector, with mission-critical infrastructure that is under-digitized and ripe for transformation.”
The product is still in development, but Abu-Ghazaleh gave us a glimpse of how it works. The system takes data from the client’s existing software, models operational workflows, and issues real-time instructions to improve efficiency.
“Right now, the operations manager might manually call someone to reroute a fuel truck or send a cleaner to a different gate,” Abu Ghazaleh said. “Our system does that orchestration automatically. AI orchestrators use real-time data to reroute vehicles, reassign crews, and adjust operations without human intervention.”
Unlike most early-stage AI startups that target specific industries, 1001 is accessible to many because the operational flow between industries is often the same, Abu Ghazaleh said.
This model is inspired by the rigor of consulting and contract work. The CEO said the team spends several weeks running joint development sprints with customers to tailor the system to the realities of each business.
“Bilal is building a decision engine that automates that complexity, leveraging proven execution at scale and regional gravity to make 1001 the platform this market is built on,” commented Neeraj Arora, Managing Director, General Catalyst.
The new funding will accelerate initial rollout across aviation, logistics and infrastructure, as well as accelerate recruitment in engineering, operations and go-to-market roles as we expand our team in Dubai and London.
1001 AI plans to start with construction and begin first customer deployments by the end of the year. Over the next five years, Abu Ghazaleh hopes the company will become the Gulf region’s go-to orchestration layer for these industries before expanding globally.
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