Think, a Saudi-based AI infrastructure company, has raised over $8 million in pre-seed funding to commercialize its high

Think, a Saudi-based company focused on building unified hardware and software infrastructure for artificial intelligence, announced it has secured over $8 million in pre-seed funding, representing the largest AI infrastructure and deeptech pre-seed round in the Middle East and North Africa region to date. The funding round is co-led by RAED Ventures and Wa'ed Ventures, with additional participation from Dhahran Techno Valley's Venture Capital arm and strategic angel investors. The capital will support team expansion, manufacturing scale-up, product development, and international growth initiatives as the company accelerates deployments across Saudi Arabia and expands into the GCC and selected global markets.

Think addresses a critical bottleneck in AI adoption by reducing the cost and complexity of AI infrastructure while substantially improving efficiency. The company's technology combines high-density, liquid-cooled multi-GPU compute nodes with proprietary bare-metal orchestration software called ILM, enabling organizations of any size to deploy AI models more efficiently, securely, and cost-effectively while maximizing compute capacity utilization.

The company was founded by Ahmed AlSharif, a technology leader with senior experience at Meta, Sony PlayStation Europe and EA Games, alongside Ammar Enaya, an enterprise technology veteran with leadership experience at Cisco, HPE Aruba and Vectra AI. CEO Ahmed AlSharif stated that as the industry moves beyond the race for larger models and data centers, a new era of efficiency is beginning. He noted that AI infrastructure today is expensive, inefficient, and increasingly difficult to scale, and that Think exists to help organizations perform more effectively with the compute they already have, offering an alternative to the industry's current focus on bigger, faster and more expensive solutions.

In production benchmark testing, Think's platform achieved sustained GPU utilization exceeding 90 percent compared with industry averages of 30 to 50 percent, with a per-million-token cost approximately 10 times lower than the average cost of using frontier models from Google, OpenAI and Anthropic. All of this is achieved using existing, widely available GPUs without requiring proprietary or specialist inference hardware. The platform will soon support mixed-vendor and specialist inference silicon for both inferencing and training applications.

As Saudi Arabia accelerates its ambitions to become a global leader in artificial intelligence, Think is building what it describes as the engine room of the AI era: the integrated infrastructure layer powering secure, efficient and sovereign AI deployments across the Kingdom and the wider GCC. The company is already engaged in multiple proofs of concept, production deployments and strategic partnerships across Saudi Arabia, including participation in the Kingdom's rapidly evolving AI ecosystem alongside initiatives such as HUMAIN.

Co-founder Ammar Enaya noted that customers want the benefits of AI without spiraling costs, security concerns and dependence associated with hyperscale cloud providers, and that the company is seeing strong demand from enterprises, startups and government organizations seeking infrastructure that delivers needed performance with total control and ownership. The funding round brings together investors who share Think's belief that the next generation of AI will be defined not only by more powerful models, but by more efficient, sovereign and economically sustainable infrastructure.

Investors expressed strong conviction in Think's mission. Wael Nafee, General Partner at RAED Ventures, stated that the next generation of AI leaders will be defined not only by the models they build but by the infrastructure making AI practical, affordable and sovereign, and that Think is tackling one of AI's biggest challenges with technology that improves efficiency while giving organizations greater control over their AI capabilities. Eng. Anas Algahtani, CEO of Wa'ed Ventures, emphasized that Saudi Arabia has a unique opportunity not only to adopt AI but to build the infrastructure powering it, and that Think is resolving one of the industry's biggest challenges by making AI deployment more efficient, scalable and sovereign. Faizan Baig, Chief Investment Officer at Dhahran Techno Valley, noted that sovereign and efficient AI infrastructure is foundational to every country's AI ambitions, and that Think is tackling one of the sector's most pressing challenges.

With funding now secured, Think plans to accelerate commercial deployments across Saudi Arabia while expanding its platform and international presence over the next 18 months, with particular focus on GCC expansion while accelerating development of ILM as a standalone software platform in support of Saudi Arabia's ambitions to become a global hub for next-generation AI infrastructure.