We are proud to present this interview as part of our Saudi Startup Success Stories series, created in partnership with StartupBlink and the National Technology Development Program (NTDP).

This conversation features Abdullah Asiri, Founder and CEO of Lucidya, a Saudi-founded AI company that has secured the one of the largest AI investments in the MENA region and is rapidly expanding its enterprise AI platform across borders.

With this being one of the largest AI investments in the region, how does Lucidya plan to position itself beyond MENA? MENA is our foundation, and we’re not done here. But the reality is we’re already operating beyond it. We have customers in the U.S., the U.K., and Pakistan today. Our technology is multilingual, and the innovation we’ve built is globally competitive. The expansion roadmap follows the product: we cement MENA leadership first, then scale the technology into markets where demand for high-performance, domain-specific AI is accelerating.

Your proprietary Arabic-language AI engine is a major differentiator. How do you plan to develop this moat further, and are there plans to license the technology? The differentiator isn’t just the engine. It’s eight years of end-to-end experience building, deploying, and commercializing Arabic AI across real enterprise environments, backed by billions of proprietary Arabic-language data points collected over nearly a decade. That dataset compounds every year. No one else in the region has it at this scale or depth. On licensing — yes. We’re running a pilot program now that gives select organizations access to our engine through integration and licensing agreements. The goal is to make world-class Arabic AI accessible to the broader ecosystem without every organization having to build from scratch. We’re the best positioned to lead that, and we will.

What sectors and job roles will AI Agents disrupt first, and how are clients responding? Let me start by saying that the role changes, it doesn’t disappear. Telecom, banking and insurance, government services, and retail are seeing the earliest and fastest traction. These are high-volume, customer-facing industries under pressure to scale without adding headcount. The roles being transformed first are contact center agents, customer support reps, and social media community managers. The numbers tell the story: our Enterprise AI Agent platform cuts average customer service costs by 60 to 70 percent, achieves over 90 percent first-contact resolution, and delivers 24/7 service with sub-second response times. Clients are not skeptical. They’re moving fast because the ROI is immediate and the compliance requirements — particularly under Saudi Arabia’s PDPL — are already built in. What we’re seeing on the ground is employees evolving into supervisors of AI workflows and customer experience strategists.

Should we interpret this funding round as early signaling of a public listing? A Saudi-founded AI company listing on Saudi markets would be a meaningful moment for the region, and growth is on the horizon. The capital is going into a 40 percent increase in R&D and AI headcount, two new product launches in 2026, and our first GCC sales office beyond Saudi Arabia. The path to a public listing runs directly through delivering on those priorities.

How did Lucidya start, and what problem were you most driven to solve? We founded Lucidya in 2016, when AI was nowhere near mainstream and Arabic-language AI barely existed as a category. Organizations across MENA had no reliable way to understand what their Arabic-speaking customers were actually saying across social media, call centers, digital channels. Global tools couldn’t handle Arabic dialect complexity. We built the infrastructure to solve that. The pandemic was the inflection point. Digital transformation accelerated overnight, and the market caught up to what we had spent years building. In Q4 2025 alone, our new sales exceeded our first six combined years of revenue. The foundation we laid in the early years — when no one was paying attention — is what made that possible.

What makes Saudi Arabia the right place to build right now? The numbers make the case. According to PwC, AI is projected to contribute $135.2 billion to Saudi GDP by 2030, equivalent to 12.4 percent of the entire economy. According to SDAIA, AI patents in the Kingdom have grown fivefold since 2019, and 42 percent of Saudi citizens are already using generative AI for professional purposes. The world is not bringing AI to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is building the AI that actually works here, and taking it to the world.

Beyond the data, Vision 2030 has shifted institutional behavior in ways that directly benefit founders. Government-backed capital, enterprise digitization mandates, and a regulatory environment increasingly aligned with innovation have created real structural support. When names like Aramco, Impact46, and Rua Growth Fund are backing your company, you understand that the highest levels of the Saudi economy are aligned with what you’re building.

What role have government programs and Vision 2030 played in Lucidya’s growth? They created the conditions. SDAIA’s establishment in 2019 and its push to integrate AI across public and private sectors changed the nature of every enterprise conversation we were having. It shifted AI from a curiosity to a strategic priority. Saudi Arabia’s ambition to lead in Arabic large language models validated our thesis at a national level and opened doors that would have taken us far longer to open independently.

What innovations are you most excited about in the pipeline? The Enterprise AI Agent platform is the centerpiece as it gives enterprises the ability to scale customer service operations without proportional headcount growth. It resolves customer requests autonomously across digital channels, escalating only complex cases to human teams, with native understanding of code-switching, regional idioms, and cultural context — not translation layers. Enterprise-grade governance and built-in PDPL compliance are foundational, not add-ons. That combination of autonomous resolution, cultural intelligence, and regulatory alignment does not exist anywhere else in the region. In 2026, we’re launching a unified case and ticketing management system and increasing R&D investment by 40 percent.

What milestone are you most proud of? There are many. I know most founders say that, but it’s true. However, if I had to choose one: Q4 2025. We achieved 3x sales growth year over year, and new sales in that single quarter exceeded our entire first six years of revenue combined. That number is not just a commercial milestone. It’s proof that the MENA market has moved from AI experimentation to full-scale operationalization, and that we built the right platform ahead of that curve.

What are your goals for the next five years? Clear MENA market leadership in AI-native customer experience, with direct presence across the GCC. Global expansion anchored in markets where our technology creates undeniable differentiation. And an IPO by 2028. The MENA CRM market is projected to reach $4.6 billion. We intend to be the defining platform in it.

What advice would you give founders building in Saudi Arabia today? Build something real and stay close to the problem. The ecosystem is more developed than it has ever been, but the founders who prevail are still the ones who stayed obsessed with what they were solving when capital was scarce and the market wasn’t ready. That discipline is what compounds. The region has the talent, the capital, and the ambition. What it needs are founders willing to build a solution that solves a real problem for the long game.

Final Thoughts

Abdullah Asiri’s journey with Lucidya reflects a broader transformation happening across Saudi Arabia; where a commitment to solving a genuinely hard, underserved problem, built years before the market was ready, is now compounding into category-defining growth. As Arabic AI becomes a strategic national priority and enterprise adoption accelerates across the GCC, Lucidya is positioned not just to lead within MENA, but to export that expertise to the world.