Oraseya Capital has announced the SANDBOX S26 cohort, selecting eight startups from a competitive field of more than 1,000 applicants across its SANDBOX Investment Program, a selection rate that places it among the more selective early-stage investment programmes operating in the UAE and GCC startup ecosystem. The cohort spans artificial intelligence, fintech, proptech, gaming, computer vision, and workplace technology, reflecting the breadth of sectors where Oraseya Capital sees the strongest early-stage investment potential within the UAE-connected startup landscape. Pre-seed to seed stage tech startups with ties to the UAE interested in future cohorts can apply at sandboxaccelerator.com.
The eight selected ventures cover a range of market opportunities with a consistent emphasis on AI-powered solutions addressing sector-specific operational inefficiencies. CERTY is building an AI-powered trade credit infrastructure platform purpose-built for the maritime, shipping, and logistics ecosystem, a sector where credit and financial infrastructure has historically lagged behind the scale and complexity of the transactions it supports. Manzilo is developing an AI-native property management operating system specifically designed for GCC landlords and property managers, addressing a market where the fragmentation and manual nature of property management creates significant operational costs for owners managing multiple units. Parallex is building a unified AI-powered sales intelligence platform for real estate developers and brokers operating in the off-plan project segment, where the combination of large transaction values, long sales cycles, and complex buyer journeys creates strong demand for data-driven sales tools.
RAPTR Games is building an integrated gaming ecosystem platform that enables e-commerce purchases and gaming transactions to be completed seamlessly within a single environment, addressing the friction that currently exists at the intersection of gaming and commerce in a region where both markets are growing rapidly. Takeem is a proptech platform modernising the renting experience by replacing traditional cheque-based payment systems with flexible monthly payment plans and a secure rent guarantee, targeting a specific and widely acknowledged pain point in GCC rental markets where the requirement for post-dated cheques creates significant financial strain for tenants and administrative complexity for landlords. vfrog is building a unified computer vision platform that enables companies to deploy production-grade computer vision solutions quickly and cost-effectively, addressing the gap between the technical capability that computer vision offers and the practical difficulty of implementing it at production scale without significant engineering resources.
Workplaced combines data-driven insights with human-centred design to help companies build more engaging, effective, and efficient workplaces, a category of enterprise software that has seen growing demand as organisations navigate the post-pandemic reconfiguration of how and where work happens. XSquare is building a unified business-to-business fintech platform operating at the intersection of payments, embedded finance, and enterprise financial automation, addressing the complexity and inefficiency of financial operations for businesses that currently manage these functions across multiple disconnected systems. The cohort as a whole reflects a deliberate investment thesis around applying AI and technology infrastructure to the specific friction points in the UAE and GCC’s most commercially active sectors, with each of the eight ventures addressing a problem that is both genuinely significant and practically addressable through a technology-driven approach that the current state of AI and software development makes viable at startup scale.
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