From Al Ain to sovereign AI.
CULTUREYES did not appear in 2024. The studio launched in March 2024, and the AI thesis took hold in December 2025. Everything you see today — the products, the proprietary model, the platform — was built in the five months since. But the instinct behind it has been forming for nine years.
2015
The barbecue that changed how I saw my country.
I was working at Al Ain Zoo for the government, living in Dubai. One evening I came home from work still in full Emirati clothes and joined a neighbourhood gathering — people from many nationalities, kids, a barbecue going. A woman who lived a few doors away kept looking at me. I joked, "You know I'm allowed four wives." (My wife was right there.) She didn't laugh. She said:
"I have lived in the UAE for the last sixteen years. This is the first time I am socializing with an Emirati."
Sixteen years. That sentence stopped me. Our tourism industry was selling the modern skyline, the malls, the beaches, the landmarks — all real, all beautiful, all managed by big commercial operators focused on volume, not authenticity. The actual country was nowhere in the experience.
So I started a Meetup group: UAE Explorers. Desert camping, hiking, traditional cooking, ghost-town hunting. In a few months we had thousands of members. At its peak the group hit 20,000 people — Emiratis and long-term residents introducing the UAE to itself.
2018 — 2020
Inside the luxury industry — watching the gap from the other side.
I left government work in 2018 and took an offer to manage Address Downtown Dubai, the most luxurious hotel in the city at the time. A year later I moved to manage Armani Hotel Dubai. From inside the hospitality machine, I saw the gap clearly: the country had world-class infrastructure for tourism and almost no infrastructure for authenticity. The people who actually knew the hidden gems — Emiratis and long-residing locals — had no way into the tourism industry. And tourists had no way to reach them.
2020 — 2021
Pandemic. Field hospitals. Then Expo.
2020 hit. Hotels shut down. I resigned and joined volunteer work in field hospitals. The UAE moved fast and was among the first countries to reopen, with Expo 2020 in full swing. I started CULTUREYES Tourism in 2021 under one promise: "creating authentic UAE experiences."
We built affordable packages real travelers could afford. The big OTAs — Expedia and the others — didn't like it; the model didn't fit their margin structure. But we survived. Travelers loved it. Real Emiratis and locals guided real experiences.
2022
Qatar World Cup — and the lesson that closed the company.
Qatar 2022. Flights between Doha and Dubai every thirty minutes — fans could fly twenty minutes to Qatar, take the metro to the stadium, watch the game, and be back in their UAE hotel the same night. We struck a deal with FlyDubai and built tour packages around it. It worked beautifully — until a large international booking partner couldn't legally settle with us due to cross-border regulatory constraints outside our control. The flights flew. The experiences delivered. The reconciliation never closed.
I closed CULTUREYES Tourism in 2023. Not because the model failed — the model worked. I closed it because I could not find anyone I trusted to run the business at the standard of authenticity it was built on. The alternative was to compromise the principle, and that wasn't going to happen.
2024
The pivot — home businesses, Khalifa Fund, the bootstrap.
By 2024 I was watching a different gap: home-based businesses run by local women and small operators were getting crushed by big online platforms and fake-gift marketplaces. I ran surveys with tourists — what they actually wanted was commitment: real products from real people. So in March 2024 I formally registered CULTUR EYES MARKET in Abu Dhabi and started building Culture Souq, the marketplace for those home businesses.
Two days before writing this I received a confirmed promise from the Khalifa Fund for a strategic partnership starting with their database of 10,000 women and families running home-based businesses across the country. That's the kind of partnership Culture Souq always needed.
To fund the build, I added corporate services as a licensed activity and signed Etihad Airways as a Diamond local content partner for advisory work. I added marketing operations and events organisation, where I'd take big contracts and bring in sub-contractors to execute. Every contract was income that funded what I was actually trying to build.
December 2025 — present
Five months. From standing start to a working studio.
I came to AI late. In December 2025 something clicked — not as a curiosity, as a responsibility. I'd been watching founders in the UAE suffer not from lack of government support but from the service providers themselves, and from imported startup methodologies dressed in Silicon Valley language. The goal of every program had quietly become "the presentation," not actual revenue, not actual launches.
Once I tried to run a market study and noticed every benchmark was wrong. I'd done the same study manually years before; I knew the real numbers. The benchmark sources were US data, AI-generated, dressed up as local. That moment cracked it open for me.
Everything below was built in the five months since.
The Inventions
Every product came from a real person's pain.
Foundermoment — born from the broken benchmark moment. An AI co-founder that thinks with founders, stress-tests strategy, finds blind spots, and is awake at 3am when the idea hits. foundermoment.ai
Istishari — early experimentation with agent frameworks showed me how powerful these systems could be — and how limited the platforms were. That was the prompt for what came next.
Nahil — my brother is a farmer. Watching him struggle to find AI that actually understood Emirati soil, Emirati crops, Emirati water — when every existing tool was translated from someone else's field — that's where Nahil came from. nahilai.com
Nabgha — I've been a paying user of mainstream AI tools since their early consumer launches. When my daughter started leaning on them heavily for school, I saw a gap: nothing was built for our children specifically, Arabic-first, curriculum-aligned, safe by design rather than safe by patch. So Nabgha.
OpSoul — the newest invention. A new generation of grounded AI agents that don't drift, don't lose scope, don't lose identity. Every product I build now stands on top of OpSoul. Further details are reserved until formal IP filings complete.
Authentic Tour — my friend who still works in tourism couldn't compete against the big OTAs and was being squeezed out. Authentic Tour is for her — and for every local guide who knows places no algorithm will ever surface. authentictour.ae
Daftar Hesab — a young woman running a small café was tired of her POS software: annual lock-in, hardware lock-in, every add-on extra, payment gateway taking 1.5%. So I built Daftar Hesab — POS plus the full small-business stack, bring your own hardware, bring your own payment gateway.
Hajeri 3B — I needed an AI model that could carry OpSoul's identity layer with real harmony. Instead of wrapping it around someone else's foundation, I trained one. A 3-billion-parameter model, novel training methodology, built from scratch on a single GPU. What started as the means to OpSoul's end became its own invention.
Where this is going
UAE invents. UAE leads. The world follows.
Nine years of operating in this country taught me something most imported playbooks miss: authenticity scales further than imitation. The tourism work taught me the gap between what's sold and what's real. The hospitality work showed me how the gap is institutionalised. The entrepreneurship work showed me how the gap is monetised. The 2022 close taught me what happens when you trust the wrong intermediary.
CULTUREYES today is a sovereign AI ventures studio because that's the answer the country actually needs at this moment. Not another AI consultancy reselling foreign tokens. Not another framework translated from English to Arabic. A studio that invents — proprietary models, applied products, novel methodologies — from Abu Dhabi outward.
Every product is grounded in a real pain I watched somebody suffer through. That's the only foundation I trust to build on.
info@cultureyes.ae