Velents is the first Arab Claude Partner

Egyptian-Saudi AI solutions startup Velents became the first Arab company to join Anthropic’s Claude Partner Network, gaining access to technical training, certifications, and engineering support from the AI lab behind the Claude family of models.

What’s in it for Velents? Claude, alongside other platforms, will help Velents’ clients operate more efficiently and scale faster, co-founder and CEO Mohamed Gaber tells EnterpriseAM. The company will use the partnership to support large firms in Saudi and Egypt.

REMEMBER- Velents launched the first fully integrated Arabic-speaking AI employee, Agent.sa, in October, alongside a USD 1.5 mn funding round earmarked for Arabic language model development, Agent.sa’s integration ecosystem, and private cloud infrastructure.

The bigger play — sovereign AI: The Claude partnership is one piece of a longer-term wager on locally controlled infrastructure. “What we are trying to do is that we cooperate with either regional or international firms so that we offer sovereign AI inside the governments and big entities because technology becomes something we control,” Gaber says.

The risks of overreliance are already playing out: Last week, the US government suspended all foreign access to Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 — abruptly cutting off customers worldwide. Anthropic complied but disputed the order, calling the security concern a narrow jailbreak replicable by other publicly available models. “When a government decided to close the technology on specific people, it was able to do that. And the companies were not able to object,” Gaber said, stressing the need for locally controlled AI infrastructure.

What’s next: Velents is targeting 4x growth this year, following a similar run last year, co-founder Abdulaziz Almuhaydib tells EnterpriseAM. The product focus is on advanced Arabic speech-to-text and text-to-speech systems — built to reduce dependence on global models. Geographically, after two years scaling in Saudi through partnerships with Red Hat and IBM, Velents entered Egypt this quarter and is planning to “focus more on the recent expansion,” Almuhaydib tells us, having already been working with Abou Ghaly, Xcite, Nafeza, and Circle K.