UAE Ministry of Economy and Huawei Cloud launch startup programme under The Entrepreneurial Nation initiative

The Entrepreneurial Nation, an initiative of the UAE Ministry of Economy, announced its partnership with Huawei Cloud to launch the Huawei Cloud startup programme in the country. The programme seeks to accelerate the UAE’s startup ecosystem, providing up to $150,000 in vouchers and access to Huawei Cloud ecosystem resources for eligible businesses.

According to the Ministry of Economy, 94 per cent of the total number of companies operating in the country are in the small and medium-sized (SMEs) or startups sector. SMEs provide jobs for more than 86 per cent of the private sector’s workforce. In Dubai, 95 per cent of the emirate’s firms consist of SMEs, employing 42 per cent of its workers and accounting for more than 40 per cent of its GDP. The Huawei Cloud startup programme will leverage Huawei’s three decades of ICT and digitalisation expertise to support this crucial sector while helping unleash innovation in the UAE and further boosting the country’s digitisation goals.

In October 2022, the Ministry of Economy launched the second phase of The Entrepreneurial Nation, the comprehensive and one-of-a-kind national project for the development of the UAE’s SMEs and the overall national entrepreneurial landscape. This phase of the project is based on the largest public-private sector partnerships of their kind and aims to develop the tools to foster the culture and practices of entrepreneurship in the UAE.

The Huawei Cloud startup programme is a global support program to help accelerate technology startups’ business growth. Through the Huawei Cloud startup programme, Huawei will leverage its global expertise and cloud innovations and help startups address challenges associated with funding, technical and commercial resources and connections they need to expand, contributing to the emergence of innovative businesses that can lead the region’s digital transformation powered by Huawei Cloud.

Jiawei Liu, CEO at Huawei UAE, said: “Startups and small businesses play a pivotal role in the continous development of UAE’s economy. We are proud to partner with The Entrepreneurial Nation Initiative by the Ministry of Economy, which provides a perfect platform for entities like Huawei to support the growth and development of the SME sector. As a leading global provider of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and smart devices, Huawei will be continuously commited to acting as the foundation for the digitalisation and development of the UAE.”

With Huawei Cloud, startups can scale their business effortlessly by eliminating high infrastructure costs and limited computing capacity associated with on-premise data centers. Businesses can also gain access to cutting-edge technologies and resources at a fraction of the cost.

Further, participating entrepreneurs can tap into Huawei’s extensive ecosystem, with access to its vast innovations, technical support, mentorship, and market development opportunities. Huawei also provides go-to-market assistance, ensuring small business owners can reach their target audience effectively. Recognising that collaboration is crucial to growth, Huawei Cloud also helps connect founders with like-minded entrepreneurs, industry experts, and thought leaders worldwide.

Huawei Cloud startup programme is a global success story. Intella is a two-year-old Egyptian startup that has developed a highly accurate Arabic voice-to-text transcription engine, encompassing all the 25 Arab dialects and whose model was trained and optimised on Huawei Cloud ModelArts. Through the Huawei Cloud startup programme, Intella received cloud credits worth tens of thousands of US dollars for AI model training in addition to co-marketing and co-selling with Huawei Cloud’s Egypt team to scale up its solution commercially.

Bright, a leading Thai-based digital school management platform, is another successful story facilitated by Huawei Cloud startup programme. After joining the programme, it took advantage of Huawei Cloud ecosystem resources, leveraging Huawei’s multi-industry resources, opening new opportunities through joint innovation with large enterprises, and has since grown rapidly in terms of investment, client base and team. Today, Bright is Thailand’s largest education tech startup with over 400,000 students and 20,000 teachers and available in over 500 Schools. It plans an IPO in the next three years.

Huawei Cloud is the fastest-growing cloud services provider in the world with an expanding list of services, including Elastic Cloud Server (ECS), cloud database, cloud security, software development services, and scenario-based solutions. By 2022, Huawei Cloud had launched more than 200 products and 200 solutions, established more than 2,800 nodes worldwide, covering more than 170 countries and regions and had more than 9,000 technical partners, with more than 100 global certifications and over 3,000,000 customers globally.

For more information, please visit Huawei online at www.huawei.com.