Author: Stuart

Dubai isn’t dabbling in flying taxis. It’s building the whole thing from scratch — vertiports, autonomous corridors, eVTOL fleets — and treating aerial mobility as permanent infrastructure, not a tech demo. But here’s the thing: the propulsion systems powering most of today’s flying taxis may not survive contact with real urban environments at scale. The propulsion system proposed by Mohsen Bahmani, which ditches conventional exposed rotors entirely, has quietly entered a conversation the industry has been avoiding. The dominant model right now is distributed rotors. Multiple propellers, electric motors, vertical lift. It works. It’s mechanically simple enough to build at…

Mindtail has closed a $2 million pre-seed round. The Istanbul studio makes hybrid casual puzzle games and counts APY Ventures as its lead investor, with Inveo Ventures and Ak Portföy GSYF also backing the round. The studio will direct the funding towards three areas: growing its team, putting AI-based production systems in place, and running early marketing tests. Mindtail expects to reach a team size roughly three times larger than today in the near term. A first game announcement is expected shortly. A founding team that has worked on some of mobile gaming’s biggest hits R. Tamer Özgen, Umut Yıldız,…

Symbolic Developments will hand over Jetour T2 SUVs alongside apartment keys to every buyer who completes a purchase at its Al Furjan project during a 31-day window in May 2026. The bundled offer, announced following a signing ceremony in Dubai, pairs each home at Symbolic Zen Residences with a family-sized vehicle. The promotion runs from 1st to 31st May next year. Elite Group Holding, the UAE distributor for Jetour, partnered with the developer to structure what both parties are calling a “One Investment, Two Keys” initiative. For Symbolic Developments, the move reflects a calculation about what sways buyers in a…

GCG Enterprise Solutions announced on 6 May that it’s rolling out print production services across Saudi Arabia and Oman, extending the Dubai-based firm’s reach into two Gulf markets where organisations increasingly need faster turnaround times for high-volume printing. The move marks a geographic bet on physical infrastructure at a time when much industry talk centres on going paperless. Transactional documents, packaging, and customer communications still require printing at scale. The expansion will give Saudi and Omani customers access to high-speed inkjet systems and digital press technology, backed by what the company describes as local expertise rather than remote support. That…

Hyde Dubai rolled out two staycation packages on Tuesday, banking on residents choosing a Business Bay hotel room over airport queues this Eid Al Adha. Rates start at AED 300 per night. The long weekend runs from 22nd to 31st May. The hotel’s Eid Staycation Offer bundles breakfast at its Occo restaurant, one complimentary drink per adult, and 20% off treatments at Laguna Spa. The second package, labelled Staycation Your Way, leans into flexibility: guests get a 24-hour stay with check-in whenever they arrive, AED 50 towards the minibar, and zero cancellation fees. That one runs through 30th September. Both…

Somewhere right now, a security analyst is triaging alerts at two in the morning. Not because threats have multiplied, but because no system can tell them which ones actually matter. Anomali launched ThreatStream Next-Gen on Tuesday to fix that bottleneck. The Redwood City firm claims its intelligence platform cuts investigation time to a fraction of traditional workflows—300 times faster, validated across 50 enterprise deployments. Available both as a standalone tool and embedded within Anomali’s Unified Security Data Lake, ThreatStream Next-Gen positions threat intelligence not as background context but as the active decision engine inside security operations. The pitch: stop detecting,…

How one couple’s frustration with Dubai’s roads turned into ScootUp — a company now reshaping the way residents move through their communities. When Jim and Ericka Mansfield relocated to Dubai Marina in 2022, they quickly discovered what thousands of residents already knew: getting around the city on four wheels was an exercise in patience. Traffic, scarce parking, and relentless heat made even short journeys feel like an ordeal. Rather than simply adapt, they started asking a different question — what if there were a smarter way? “We were looking for high-quality scooters and realised the market was fragmented — mostly…

OGold signed up its millionth user sometime during its first 12 months of operation, processing $50 million in transactions along the way. Now the Dubai-based fintech has secured investment from Plug and Play Ventures, the Silicon Valley firm that backed PayPal, Dropbox and Honey before they became household names. The timing matters. Digital precious metals platforms are multiplying across the Gulf, each promising fractional ownership and mobile-first access. OGold’s traction—confirmed on 27 April—suggests it’s pulling ahead in a crowded field. What sets the platform apart? Entry starts at AED 1, roughly 27 cents. That price point has turned gold from…

Private market investors in the Middle East have historically paid intermediaries to access deal flow, often waiting weeks for introductions that may never materialise. On 28 April 2026, Dubai-based FinBursa launched a mobile app designed to eliminate that friction entirely. The platform connects investors directly with founders raising capital—no brokers, no success fees, no third-party aggregators skimming data. Startups, private companies, and fund managers list opportunities themselves. Investors browse anonymously. It’s the first dedicated private markets discovery app built specifically for the MENA region. FinBursa’s model hinges on what the company calls “direct source integrity.” Company founders, owners, and authorised…

In 2017, Shaher Moh’d Ali Awartani joined H.E. Yousif Al Otaiba and Mubadala Investment Company to co-found Café Milano Abu Dhabi, bringing the well-known Washington, D.C. restaurant brand to the UAE capital’s Four Seasons Hotel. The venture marked Awartani’s first move into the hospitality sector, adding a consumer-facing business to a portfolio built mainly on infrastructure, real estate, and financial services. Café Milano’s Washington original has long been a meeting point for diplomatic and political figures — a character that transfers naturally to Abu Dhabi’s Four Seasons, where the clientele includes government and institutional figures in much the same way.…