FAST Ventures has launched MATTE, a new artificial intelligence-driven marketing technology company aimed at small and mid-sized agencies and in-house advertisers across the Middle East and North Africa. Announced from Dubai on April 14, 2026, the venture is positioned as a response to the operational inefficiencies that often consume performance marketing teams working across multiple platforms and tools. The company says MATTE is designed to give regional marketing teams access to enterprise-style automation without the cost and complexity typically associated with large-scale MarTech systems.
A New Layer for Marketing Operations
According to FAST Ventures, MATTE focuses on the operational side of performance marketing by deploying AI agents, automated workflows, and connected data systems that manage repetitive execution tasks. Rather than requiring teams to rebuild campaigns, pull reports, and monitor performance manually, the platform is intended to standardize campaign setup, automate reporting, and maintain continuous oversight through AI-based processes. That structure is meant to allow marketers to spend more time on strategic planning, client management, and business decisions rather than routine administration.
The company said the business emerged from internal challenges experienced within FAST Ventures’ own operations, where a significant share of team time was being absorbed by reporting, campaign setup, data collection, and manual optimization. Waseem Afzal, chief executive and founder of FAST Ventures, said the business was created after the group examined how much of its daily workload was tied to tasks that should no longer require direct human effort. He described MATTE as an effort to return time and capacity to teams so they can focus on work more closely linked to performance and growth.
Opening Up Internal Technology
A central part of the launch is the decision to open-source the automation engine that powered Platformance, FAST Ventures’ outcome-based marketing platform. FAST Ventures said the underlying AI agents and workflow systems were developed and tested across thousands of live campaigns over the past three years within its own group before being spun out into MATTE. By releasing the core technology more broadly, the company is attempting to lower the barriers that have historically limited advanced marketing automation to large organizations with dedicated operations and engineering teams.
That approach reflects a broader strategic position that automation in marketing should not be restricted by enterprise budgets or complex implementation requirements. MATTE is being presented as a way for smaller agencies and growth teams to access infrastructure that would otherwise be expensive to build or difficult to maintain internally. In practical terms, the company is offering a system that aims to reduce manual work while preserving human oversight through approval checkpoints at key stages of campaign management.
Integrated for a Multi-Platform Region
MATTE is designed to operate across a wide range of digital advertising and business systems through open API integrations. The company said the platform connects natively with major advertising and measurement environments including Google Ads, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Amazon Ads, Google Analytics, and DV360, while also extending into CRMs, finance tools, mobile measurement partners, and cloud data platforms. By linking marketing, sales, data, and revenue systems into a single workflow, the product is intended to support campaign execution and reporting from one central workspace.
FAST Ventures is also framing MATTE as a regional solution built around the realities of Gulf marketing operations rather than an imported product retrofitted for local use. The company said the platform was developed with Arabic and English campaign management, local data considerations, and the region’s platform mix in mind from the outset. Luqman Sohail, head of MATTE, said the guiding principle behind the business was to remove work from people unless it required human judgment or creativity.
Regional Opportunity in the Gulf
The launch comes as the UAE and Saudi Arabia continue to expand as leading digital advertising markets in the region, with growing pressure on agencies and brand teams to manage increasingly fragmented media ecosystems. FAST Ventures argues that smaller agencies in those markets remain underserved by current tools, which are often either too basic to deliver intelligent automation or too expensive and operationally heavy for regional teams to adopt. The company also pointed to Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030-driven digital transformation as a factor increasing demand for locally usable marketing infrastructure.
MATTE enters the market as FAST Ventures attempts to carve out a position between entry-level marketing tools and enterprise software platforms. Its pitch centers on making AI-powered automation accessible to agencies and advertisers that need greater efficiency but lack the resources to deploy heavyweight systems. Whether that proposition gains traction will depend on how effectively MATTE can translate internal operational success into a wider product offering for MENA’s fast-evolving marketing sector.