The Presight-Shorooq Fund I, a $100 million global AI fund launched in September 2025, has disclosed its first five investments.
The portfolio spans sovereign cloud infrastructure, vertical AI for construction and finance, voice-first mobile agents, and AI-powered spreadsheet automation, with companies based across Abu Dhabi and San Francisco.
The fund is a joint venture between Presight, the ADX-listed AI and data analytics arm of G42, and Shorooq, the Abu Dhabi-headquartered alternative asset manager.
It is led by Dr. Bilal Baloch, Partner at Shorooq, and targets 25 to 30 AI-first startups globally, with 40% of capital reserved for follow-on rounds.
Portfolio companies gain access to Presight's compute infrastructure, including cloud and GPU resources, alongside G42's international customer network and Shorooq's MENA distribution.
"To have invested in five highly promising companies, after assessing over 1,000, outside our home market alongside leading peers in the US and Asia in 120 days is a marker toward that vision," said Dr. Baloch. "These founders are pushing the boundaries of what AI can do, from giving every app a voice interface to automating billion-dollar industries, and thereby allowing us to back varying theses across the AI stack."
The five investments, selected from over 1,000 companies screened in the fund's first 120 days, are:
NodeShift ($1 million seed, Abu Dhabi) is building a sovereign AI cloud platform designed to replace fragmented legacy infrastructure. Founded by Andrey Surkov and Mihai Mărcuță, former Cisco, Microsoft, and Tesla engineers, NodeShift consolidates virtualisation, cloud management, and the AI stack into a single Rust-based platform. The company claims GPU workloads up to 65% cheaper than public clouds, with air-gapped architecture designed for high-security clients across the GCC, Central Asia, Europe, and the US.
Candid ($6 million seed, San Francisco) automates the pre-construction bidding process for engineering, procurement, and construction firms. Co-founded by Talha Faiz and Hassan Azmat, both mechanical engineers who worked on large-scale energy projects in Asia before pursuing AI research at Carnegie Mellon, Candid claims to compress bid preparation from 12 weeks to one to two weeks while tightening error margins from ±25% to ±10%.
Hebbia (undisclosed investment, New York) is an enterprise AI platform for complex knowledge work in finance, law, and government. Founded by George Sivulka at Stanford in 2020, Hebbia raised a $130 million Series B in mid-2024 led by Andreessen Horowitz at an approximately $700 million valuation, with participation from Index Ventures, Google Ventures, and Peter Thiel. Its flagship product, Matrix, ingests millions of pages of unstructured data and performs multi-step analysis with citation-backed verification. The company counts roughly a third of the top 50 global asset managers by AUM as customers.
Blue ($5.5 million pre-seed, San Francisco) is a Y Combinator-backed startup developing a mobile "Action Model" that controls phone interfaces via voice commands. Unlike current assistants that rely on developer-built API integrations, Blue simulates direct UI interaction through a patent-pending USB-C hardware dongle called "The Bud." Co-founded by Omar Abdelaziz (formerly Google Assistant, where he led its LLM transition), Peter Krogh (Google DeepMind, design lead for Gemini Live actions), and Farhan Hossain (Apple Vision Pro).
Crunched ($6 million seed, San Francisco) is an AI-powered Excel agent for consulting and investment finance. The platform audits financial models, pulls data from external sources into templates, and builds analyses from scratch, with early users in consulting and private equity reporting productivity gains of over 2x. Co-founded by Michael Sakowski, Lars G. Musæus, Markus Skagemo, and Philip Z. Borge, with backgrounds spanning McKinsey, banking, and enterprise AI.
The co-investor list across the portfolio reads as a directory of global VC; Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Google Ventures, Quiet Capital, First Round Capital, and Y Combinator, alongside angel investors including Yann LeCun, Paul Graham, and Peter Thiel.
The fund's advisory board, appointed in November 2025, is chaired by Mansoor Al Mansoori, Vice Chairman of Presight, and includes Jack Selby of Thiel Capital and Meng Xiong Kuok of Singapore's K3 Ventures.
The portfolio disclosure comes weeks after Shorooq launched a separate $200 million late-stage growth fund at Web Summit Qatar, backed by QIA and other sovereign and institutional investors.
That vehicle, operating under the Qatalyst Series, targets pre-IPO companies with clear exit pathways. Between the two funds, Shorooq now covers the full capital stack from seed through to public-market readiness, and has crossed $1 billion in AUM across venture capital, credit, private equity, and real assets.
