Snowflake Launches Startups Programme to Scale AI Innovation in UAE

Snowflake,  the AI Data Cloud company, has unveiled Snowflake for Startups, which serves as a launchpad for founders to build and scale enterprise-grade AI applications on Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud, providing new product capabilities, strategic relationships with leading venture capital firms.

The initiative also aligns with the ‘We the UAE 2031’ vision, which seeks to strengthen the UAE’s position as a global economic hub and create an advanced, innovation-led environment that supports entrepreneurs and globally competitive businesses, underpinned by advanced digital infrastructure. Snowflake for Startups empowers UAE founders with a secure, production-ready data and AI foundation, enabling them to meet the performance, governance, and trust requirements of large organisations from day one.

“The UAE has embraced AI as a core economic driver, and startups here are building to compete globally from the outset. Snowflake for Startups is designed to meet that ambition by giving founders access to the same secure, scalable data and AI foundation used by large enterprises. With AI adoption at around 84% across organisations in the region, the focus is on building AI that is ready for real-world use and long-term scale.”

– Tareq Masoud, Country Manager, UAE, Snowflake

“Across EMEA, we’re seeing a new generation of startups designing for scale from the outset. Snowflake for Startups enables founders to focus on innovation while we provide the performance, governance, and reliability they need to grow.”

– Ash Mugridge, RVP of Digital Natives & SMBs, EMEA, Snowflake

Lowering the barrier to production-ready AI

Snowflake for Startups simplifies how early-stage companies access managed AI capabilities. By providing self-service access to enterprise-grade AI infrastructure within Snowflake’s secure environment, startups can build, test, and deploy AI applications and agents without diverting resources to managing complex infrastructure. Startups can also accelerate their product innovation and scale seamlessly by using Cortex REST API, a secured and unified API layer that makes switching between leading AI frontier models easy, trusted, and cost-efficient.

Snowflake for Startups offers a comprehensive toolkit that combines marketplace access, startup acceleration, and venture investment. Founders gain exposure to more than 12,600 potential customers through Snowflake Marketplace, benefit from credits, engineering support, go-to-market guidance through the Snowflake Startup Accelerator, and access capital and strategic backing through Snowflake Ventures, which continues to expand its global startup portfolio.

How UAE startups are applying Snowflake

Sarwa, a UAE online investment platform, is using Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud to create a shared data foundation that supports reporting and day-to-day operations across the business. Snowflake brings together information from Sarwa’s databases, front-end, customer service platform and other systems in a centralised environment, where it can be prepared for business use and shared with downstream tools. This gives access to teams across reporting, operations, marketing and compliance to the information they need, while providing a foundation that can support Sarwa’s wider data requirements as the business evolves.

“Snowflake has given us the ability to bring together data from across the business and make it accessible to the teams that need it. It allows us to use the right tools for different parts of our stack while connecting those workflows at the data layer. This has empowered teams across the company to work with data more effectively, while allowing us to evolve our infrastructure as our needs change.”

– Jad Sayegh, CTO & Co-founder, Sarwa