1001 raises $30M Series A led by Lux Capital to build sovereign AI for Gulf critical infrastructure

1001, the London- and GCC-based company building what it calls sovereign AI for critical infrastructure, has raised a $30 million Series A led by Lux Capital.

PIF-owned Sanabil Investments, 9Yards and Hanabi joined the round, while existing backers General Catalyst, CIV and Stanford AI researcher Chris Ré all increased their commitments.

Angel investors including Ramp co-founder Karim Atiyeh, Clay co-founder Kareem Amin and Cognition president Russell Kaplan also took part.

The raise comes barely eight months after 1001 closed a $9 million seed round in October led by CIV, General Catalyst and Lux Capital, a rapid step-up for a company founded only in 2025.

The proceeds will grow the team, particularly in engineering, and expand sales and marketing across key GCC markets. The company employs around 14 people and says it already draws technical talent from institutions including Yale, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon, with Abu-Ghazaleh telling FWDstart it is now hiring across the board.

1001 builds systems that sit above the software an operator already runs and construct a live model of the entire operation, every asset, process, dependency and constraint, then identify what is about to go wrong and recommend or execute a response.

The company pitches this at sectors where operators make thousands of high-stakes decisions under pressure, including aviation, ports and logistics, energy, and manufacturing, and stresses that its systems are built, owned and governed locally so clients keep control of infrastructure they cannot afford to switch off.

McKinsey estimates broader AI adoption could add as much as $150 billion to GCC economies, around 9% of combined GDP. "Business leaders here don't just want pilots," said founder and CEO Bilal Abu-Ghazaleh. "They want sovereign systems that deliver measurable results and make thousands of real-time decisions they can trust."

Abu-Ghazaleh told FWDstart the breadth is narrower than it appears, since the underlying problems repeat across sectors. "Crane allocation for construction is really no different than crane allocation for ports," he said, with the same true of fleet management across aviation, ports and trucking, letting 1001 build a use case in one sector and carry it cleanly into the next. He gave fleet management as a worked example, where the system models demand five to six years out, then works through what an operator should buy versus lease, which routes to run and how to price them, all the way to when to retire assets. Because those fleets are worth tens of billions of dollars, small optimisations are worth hundreds of millions, and "one use case can provide up to $100 million a year," he said.

Delivery runs on a model reminiscent of Palantir's forward-deployed engineers, with 1001 installing its platform on a fully sovereign basis, then embedding its own engineers inside a client's operations to tailor it to that business. "We're spending the entire week in their office, week after week, figuring out how to best help them," Abu-Ghazaleh said.

He added that the company is deliberately model-agnostic, running evaluations across open- and closed-source large language models and falling back on more traditional machine-learning optimisers where generative AI is not the right tool, rather than using a given technology for its own sake.

Abu-Ghazaleh was born in Amman and spent close to a decade in the US, joining computer-vision startup Hive AI before moving to Scale AI in 2020, where he rose to director of generative AI operations. He left to start 1001 after Meta's investment in Scale shifted the company's direction, framing the new venture as a chance to build frontier AI in the region rather than abroad. He told FWDstart the company splits itself between London and the Gulf by design, its customers and design partners are the region's largest operators, while London offers the talent density to build and service the product.

The Series A deepens an already notable cap table. Alongside the institutional backers, 1001 has drawn regional and global angels including Replit's Amjad Masad, DAMAC's Amira Sajwani, RAED Ventures' Khalid Bin Bader Al Saud and Lean Technologies co-founder Hisham Al-Falih.

Lux Capital partner Deena Shakir described 1001's founders as "mission-driven, technically world-class, and building in one of the most consequential environments anywhere," adding that the company was proving frontier AI for critical infrastructure could be built, owned and governed locally rather than imported from abroad.

A spokesperson for Sanabil said GCC economies were "investing at unprecedented scale in data, compute and infrastructure," with the focus now on building local capability to operate those assets with trusted AI, positioning 1001 as a potential "key sovereign AI partner for institutions across all critical infrastructure."

The name carries a double meaning, Abu-Ghazaleh said, both a nod to One Thousand and One Nights and, for the engineers, the binary reading of 1001. The deeper resonance is the company's mission, to "find people who, like me, are from the region, worked or studied abroad and wanna move back, and don't want it to feel like a compromise."