UAE-based Mastiska has raised a $10 million seed round to accelerate its push into data-center-class AI chips and inference accelerators. The funding, sourced mainly from GCC sovereign wealth funds, positions the company at the center of the region’s emerging sovereign AI ambitions. Founded in 2024 by CEO Suresh Sugumar, Mastiska aims to build a UAE-based fabless semiconductor company that can serve demand across the GCC, South Asia, and the wider Global South.
Funding Round and Investor Profile
The $10 million seed round is largely backed by sovereign wealth funds from the Gulf, signaling strong strategic support rather than purely financial interest. Some investors have attached operational conditions, including a requirement to open a 60-person office in one GCC country, which Mastiska is prepared to meet as it scales. This alignment with sovereign investors reflects the company’s vision of building infrastructure that is tightly coupled with national and regional priorities.
Building a Sovereign AI Chip Company
Mastiska is built on the premise that sovereign AI starts with sovereign silicon, meaning countries need control over the hardware that powers their AI systems. The company plans to create a fabless semiconductor business in the UAE, enabled by open-source technologies to increase transparency and flexibility. This model is designed to reduce reliance on U.S. and Chinese suppliers and to give governments greater control over their AI compute stack.
Technical Roadmap and First Products
The company’s first commercial product will be custom FPGA cards loaded with Mastiska’s proprietary IP. These PCIe cards are based on the Agilex-7M platform and are expected to ship with up to 96 GB of HBM, significantly higher than the 32 GB typically offered on standard Agilex-7M cards. Mastiska emphasizes that these FPGA cards are not mere prototypes but production-grade products aimed at real data-center deployments.
Focus on Security and Auditability
Cybersecurity and trust are central to Mastiska’s sovereign AI positioning, particularly for government and critical infrastructure customers. Sovereign customers will be granted full access to audit the chip designs, allowing them to verify security properties and detect potential vulnerabilities. This level of transparency is intended to differentiate Mastiska from traditional vendors that treat underlying designs as opaque black boxes.
Teams, Technology, and Target Markets
Mastiska’s team of around 40 is split between a model creation team in Abu Dhabi and a VLSI design team in India, combining AI research with deep semiconductor expertise. Alongside its hardware roadmap, the company is developing brain-inspired AI models, including modified transformers that aim to improve performance and energy efficiency for inference workloads. Its commercial focus is on sovereign customers in the UAE, the wider GCC, South and Southeast Asia, BRICS countries, and the Global South, explicitly steering clear of the increasingly contested U.S.-China AI chip battleground.
By combining custom hardware, open-source enablement, and sovereign-grade security, Mastiska is positioning itself as a new regional player in AI infrastructure. The $10 million seed round from GCC sovereign funds gives it the capital and political backing needed to pursue an ambitious semiconductor roadmap from the UAE. If it can execute on its FPGA products and longer-term AI chip vision, Mastiska could help reshape how emerging markets access and control high-end AI compute.