E-Paper
Sign In
MetisJean puts AI ownership back in the hands of business
CEO Alexander Haywood says the company will expand its sovereign AI offerings across the region while strengthening its presence in the UAE
- PUBLISHED: Fri 2 Oct 2026, 7:30 AM
MetisJean is placing significant confidence in the UAE's sovereign artificial intelligence (AI) vision as it looks to expand the product portfolio of the newly established company across the region from its Dubai headquarters, according to its top executive.
Alexander Haywood, Chief Executive Officer of MetisJean, said the company has deliberately chosen the UAE as its operational base and plans to scale its business from within the country.
Recommended For You
"We are not looking to scale outside the territory. We have an office in Dubai and will be opening one in Abu Dhabi soon," Haywood told BTR.
MetisJean is the research and development company behind Jean, a sovereign AI operating system that enables organisations to run AI within their own infrastructure rather than relying on foreign-hosted models.
Operating in both English and Arabic, Jean integrates with existing business systems, including databases, email, documents, calendars and accounting platforms, while ensuring compliance with company policies and regulatory requirements.
According to the company, the platform learns how an organisation operates, allowing responses to be grounded in its own data and traceable to original sources. By connecting information across multiple systems, Jean provides businesses with a more complete and contextual understanding of their operations.
MetisJean Investment Plans
Haywood said MetisJean received close to $3 million (Dh11.02million) in pre-seed funding and this has enabled the company to build a working product that embodies our vision of sovereign AI. That product is now live and in use with our first customers.
“At this moment in time, we are seeking $5 million (Dh18.36million) of seed funding to build out the product further through the course of 2027. We have big ideas for product development and are seeking investors to help fulfil these ambitions. If that sounds of interest to would-be investors, we’d love them to get in touch.
“We’re in a lot of constructive discussions with public and private sector organisations in the UAE about how we can support them with sovereign AI capabilities that harness the intelligence in their organisations without compromising their privacy and intellectual property,” he said.
MetisJean Revenue Generation
Haywood proudly pointed out that all of the company’s growth in the coming years will come from the UAE.
“Basing MetisJean in the UAE is a deliberate choice because there is such strong alignment between the National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence 2031 and our motivations for building Jean.
“I was very impressed when I read the details of the Strategy and I congratulate the people involved in developing it. It is far sighted in guarding against some of the risks posed by the technology — risks such as training the machines to replace you; decreasing professional capabilities through ongoing AI usage; and an over-reliance on unreliable external actors.”
The hyperscaler AI firms are learning from AI how to replace not just individual job roles but entire industries via the API requests they serve. Customers of the large LLMs make themselves unnecessarily vulnerable. All it takes to derail a business is an increase in fees, a change in functionality or the removal of a feature.
The way that Jean works avoids these risks and is particularly suited to the UAE’s demands for sovereign AI. Rather than renting intelligence from a foreign-hosted model, organisations run Jean inside their own infrastructure, where she connects to their business systems, learns how the company works and governs every action on an immutable, audit-ready ledger.
He said 100% of the company’s revenue in the next three years will come from the UAE – either from organisations based here, or foreign firms doing business here and needing assistance with sovereign AI. Jean is bi-lingual operates in English and Arabic.
“We are prioritising UAE industries with strict data residency and compliance requirements — such as finance, healthcare, energy, and government. Black-box, foreign hosted LLMs are a liability for businesses in these sectors. Jean’s owned, validated model overcomes that barrier.
“We are seeing a lot of traction already. After shipping Jean 1.0, we have now brought our first customers on board and we're in partnership discussions with AI hardware providers in the UAE.”
Savings through MetisJean’s solutions
To mitigate the risks posed by the leading LLMs, Haywood said MetisJean scatters queries over dozens of different models so that no single one gets a full picture.
From an initial query, Jean builds workflows that replicate what an LLM would do. Instead of sending multiple calls to an LLM about the same query (and incurring the same expense multiple times), Jean takes the LLM-generated code from the first query, and then reuses that code for further requests, bringing the capability in-house for the customer and reducing LLM token usage.
For businesses consuming a million or more tokens, he said Jean reduces the power it takes to service these tokens by close to 30% today and with extra investment we believe we can hit closer to the 90% mark as we help businesses migrate from probabilistic to deterministic reasoning.
“Not only that, but we can get Jean up and running at a new customer in two weeks.”
Direct, Specialised Jobs Creation
Haywood said MetisJean has invested close to $3 million in building a working product and are looking for $5 million in seed funding.
“All this funding is to drive growth in the UAE. Our plan is to recruit locally and scale. We will be recruiting Emirati employees so that we can participate in the UAE’s ranking system. The management team and I are now based in Dubai. A number of our development team are already here or in the process of moving.
“As we were developing Jean, we came across the UAE National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence 2031. This recognised many of the risks we had also noticed for businesses renting AI capabilities from unreliable global entities rather than developing their own proprietary AI-driven intelligence.”
The Strategy aims for the UAE to build an international reputation as a test bed and launchpad for AI companies, research, and talent. The Strategy was a huge factor in convincing us that the UAE had to be the home for MetisJean.
“As the UAE has recognised, there are specific sectors where compliance requirements and the need to retain control and ownership of the data makes black-box, foreign-hosted LLMs a liability — sectors such as finance, healthcare, energy and government. That said, we're convinced that every single company will be looking for a solution like Jean in the next 18 months.”
In reply to a question where MetisJean sees the greatest economic opportunity for AI growth in the UAE over the next three years, he said: “Actually, an interesting aspect here is the opportunity for the UAE in terms of global influence. The UAE’s drive to create genuinely sovereign AI, which blends AI hardware with a software layer on top, will enable the country to punch above its weight on the world stage.”
He said the UAE’s AI strategy has not only identified very valid concerns about enterprise AI adoption — concerns shared by businesses and countries across the world — it has put forward responsible solutions. These solutions allow UAE organisations to harness the benefits of AI, while mitigating the risks.
“In the coming years, this stance will result in the UAE having an outsized influence on the future development of AI and its take-up by businesses,” Haywood concluded.
