The AHOY Group
A deep-tech company built to solve the hardest problems in physical infrastructure.
AHOY was founded on a simple thesis: the world's most critical systems, traffic, utilities, logistics, were being left behind by software built for the cloud. We set out to build the infrastructure layer that changes that.
2018
Founded
$100M+
Revenue (2026)
330×
Growth, 5 years
3
Continents
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01
The founding story
It started with an earthquake and an algorithm.
In 2008, Jamil Shinawi was working on a UN earthquake recovery project when he wrote a piece of software to automate disaster aftermath management. The algorithm worked. But building it exposed something that would stay with him: most software engineers had no foundation in Operations Research, the mathematical discipline behind real-world optimization, logistics, and modern AI.
"To solve complex urban and societal problems, you don't need better apps. You need an entirely new technical foundation."
That realization sat with Jamil for nearly a decade. He spent the intervening years studying how cities actually work, supply chains, mobility networks, infrastructure systems and building toward the company that would eventually become AHOY.
In 2018, AHOY was founded in Dubai. The initial focus was logistics: building routing, addressing, and mobility APIs from scratch, not licensing them. The company scaled fast across the Gulf, building proprietary IoT hardware alongside its software stack and landing contracts with airports, governments, and enterprise operators across the region.
What looked like a logistics company from the outside was, from the inside, always a research project. The goal was never last-mile delivery. It was figuring out how software could govern physical systems at scale.
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02
The journey
Eight years. One direction.
AHOY has grown from a Dubai logistics startup into a global deep-tech company. Every step has been toward the same problem: making AI work in the physical world.
2018
Dubai
Founded in Dubai
2020
Seed
First institutional funding validates the approach. The team doubles down on building infrastructure, not applications, and begins selling to enterprise operators and regional governments.
2022
GCC
AHOY scales to airports across Saudi Arabia
29 airports in Saudi Arabia · thousands of global enterprise clients
2023
Group
2026
Now
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03
The ecosystem
AHOY Group is the holding entity behind AHOY Technology and a growing ecosystem of companies, funds, and initiatives built around the same mission, making AI and advanced technology more accessible, sovereign, and impactful in the real world.
Technology
Portfolio
AHOY Group backs early-stage companies and operates shared services, including media, talent, and professional services, that support the broader ecosystem.
Community
Shared services
Centralized capabilities in media production, talent acquisition, and operational infrastructure that are shared across group companies and portfolio investments.
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04
The shift
Why Physical AI is a different problem than cloud AI.
Most enterprise AI assumes the cloud. It assumes latency is acceptable, connectivity is reliable, and data can leave the building. For the systems AHOY works in traffic networks, utility grids, airport operations, sovereign infrastructure. None of those assumptions hold.
latency is a physical constraint
A traffic signal that waits 300ms for a cloud response has already missed the window. Physical systems require decisions in under 100ms, on-device.
sovereignty is non-negotiable
Governments and critical infrastructure operators cannot send operational data to a public cloud. Air-gap requirements are common, not edge cases.
Connectivity cannot be assumed
The most important infrastructure often sits in the least connected environments. The system has to work offline, completely, not degraded.
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05
Global presence
Two headquarters. One research hub. Three continents.
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06
How we operate
The principles behind everything we build and every partnership we form.
Partnership over transaction
AHOY works with governments, integrators, and technology partners building for the long term. A sales close is the beginning of a relationship, not the end of one.
Flexible by design
Locally sovereign
Data sovereignty and local infrastructure are requirements, not options. Every deployment is designed so no operational data leaves the client's environment unless they choose it.
Open for builders
Developer tools should be accessible. AHOY SDKs ship with permissive licensing and full documentation. We build the infrastructure; we want the ecosystem to build on top of it.
Impact over optics
We measure success by systems in production. Traffic that reroutes itself, utilities that predict failures, infrastructure that works for communities for decades.
Sustainable growth
330× growth in five years. None of it sacrificed the technical foundation. We grow at the pace that lets us keep building things that last.
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07
The team
We hire people who came from the systems we're building for. AHOY's team is not a collection of generalist technologists who pivoted into infrastructure.
