Dubai-based RegTech startup Qadi has emerged from stealth with the announcement of a pre-seed funding round led by Incubayt. The company is developing the Middle East’s first sovereign regulatory compliance platform designed for the artificial intelligence era, built to convert local laws and regulations into machine-interpretable systems that can evaluate and enforce compliance. Qadi aims to transform how regional law firms and institutions manage legal workflows by embedding automated compliance checks directly into their operations.
Automating Compliance with AI Agents
Qadi's platform operates by deconstructing local legislation, regulatory frameworks, and internal policies, encoding their rules into specialized AI agents. These agents are designed to conduct compliance determinations and integrate checks proactively into business workflows, offering a powerful alternative to traditional manual legal reviews. This approach is intended to reduce administrative workloads, shorten approval timelines, and minimize the potential for human error.
The practical applications of this architecture are extensive, turning fragmented compliance tasks into end-to-end workflows. One group of agents can take first-pass responsibility for contracts such as Non-disclosure Agreements and Master Service Agreements, checking them against local requirements and internal playbooks, routing them to the right approvers, and notifying commercial teams when deals are ready to move. Another group can focus on scanning media assets to ensure they comply with regional financial promotions and advertising rules.
A Sovereign Solution for a Modernizing Region
A key differentiator for Qadi is its focus on building a sovereign platform tailored specifically to MENAT legal and regulatory systems. The platform combines regional legal expertise, regulatory depth, and data sovereignty in a single infrastructure layer, addressing a critical need as Middle Eastern governments update laws around AI, data security, and digital services. Qadi’s deployment model, which keeps institutional data and policies within each organization’s own environment, is designed to provide legal and compliance teams with a system they can trust.
Sami Khoreibi, investor and founder of Incubayt, emphasized that regulatory AI in the region must be sovereign and deeply tuned to local rules, moving from experimental projects to core infrastructure. He highlighted Qadi’s strategy of starting from local laws, regulations, and policies, encoding them into agents, and deploying those agents within clients’ own environments as exactly what sophisticated regional institutions are demanding.
Strategic Vision and Future Growth
Founded in 2025 by Mohamad El Charif, Qadi was created to address the mounting compliance burden facing institutions across the Middle East as regulatory frameworks evolve. The company’s vision is to provide a user-friendly suite of tools that helps legal and compliance teams navigate an ever-changing regulatory landscape by automating checks and embedding regulatory logic directly into day-to-day workflows.
The newly secured pre-seed funding will fuel the expansion of Qadi’s team of AI and legal engineers and accelerate product development. The capital will also support the rollout of the platform to select law firms and financial institutions across the GCC, alongside pilots with government and regulated private-sector partners.
According to founder Mohamad El Charif, Qadi is not just building a simple AI copilot, but “the engine for compliance automation,” positioning itself as the backbone of the next generation of legal services in the region. By bridging the gap between strategic legal advisory and advanced AI agents, the startup aims to become a foundational element of digital governance and regulatory infrastructure.
As the Middle East continues to modernize its legal and regulatory regimes and attract global investment, Qadi’s launch arrives at a pivotal moment. The company is positioning its sovereign platform as the regulatory operating layer for the region’s most important institutions, embedding regulatory intelligence directly into operational workflows to enable instant, scalable, and trustworthy decision-making in an increasingly complex environment.