Presight is bullish on domestic AI sector amid defense and local resilience push, with plans to scale defense solutions

AI-powered data analytics firm Presight plans to expand its defense tech stack and sharpen its focus on domestic resilience amid a broader national focus on security and defense in light of the regional conflict, Senior Director of Investor Relations Roger Tejwani tells EnterpriseAM.

The firm’s National Crisis Emergency Platform, which operates in Abu Dhabi, was “very active” during the war, and use cases were expanded in real time for situations like handling fallen debris from interceptions, allocation of resources, and test cases around hospital evacuation protocols, to give a few examples, Tejwani says.

“There’s conversations happening across other emirates — and even internationally — to scale the use of this platform,” he adds, referencing the impact of the war on other emirates like Dubai, Fujairah, and Ras Al Khaimah.

There are plenty of non-kinetic defense use cases that can be scaled as mission-critical solutions, as sovereigns’ focus on national and institutional resilience, operational continuity, and data security ramps up, he explains. “There’s a renewed focus on the role AI can play in defense and the full defense and safe city optimization chain — from joint manpower operation to logistics and supply chains, as well as things like shelter planning and optimization,” Tejwani says.

The focus on defense comes amid a broader policy shift that was evident at last week’s Make It in the Emirates. The mandate is now to move beyond just local assembly or procurement and instead push towards owning the full ecosystem (components, IP, supply chains, and tech transfer). Presight, a state-backed, Abu Dhabi-based big data analytics firm specialized in developing smart city software applications and sovereign AI platforms, is in a great position to own the safe-city optimization and data governance side of this.

It also comes amid a potentially broader focus on infrastructure resilience across other critical industries, including tech. The war exposed vulnerabilities across data center infrastructure, with kinetic attacks on Amazon Web Services’ data centers in Dubai and Bahrain leading to outages and months-long repairs.

Presight is already working on a command-and-control platform for Khazna’s data centers in the region, which would help “optimize performance, monitor performance, and ensure operational continuity,” Tejwani says, explaining that a platform like that, along with a potential rethink of some data centers’ design or their distribution, will support the Emirati AI sector.

“I think the Middle East will remain a critical node for compute,” he says, adding, “there are very few territories globally where you have that combination of cost-efficient energy, scalability, strategic intent, capital, chips, and cooling.”

This all adds to other domestic tailwinds, including the government’s recent decision to deploy agentic AI across 50% of government services.

Equal parts domestic and international expansion

The company is focusing on a “twin-growth” strategy, whereby international revenues will be on par with domestic revenues and Presight’s own domestic national-scale platforms can be replicated and exported to other countries, Tejwani tells us. International revenues grew 63% y-o-y off an “already high base [in 1Q 2025],” he says, and their share of total revenues was around 30%.

Everything built in Abu Dhabi is built with the potential to export it in mind. “We often bring ministries into the UAE to show them the full scale of what they can achieve through AI, and they’re keen to replicate that in their own territories,” Tejwani explains.

Presight is in talks with countries across Central Asia, Africa, and the Balkans, where an agreement is expected soon, Tejwani tells us. It already has smart city programs and supercomputer projects in place in countries like Kazakhstan and Albania, as well as Gabon, the Ivory Coast, and Burkina Faso in Africa.

A closer look at the numbers

The firm’s net income after tax grew 11.5% y-o-y to AED 133.8 mn, while revenues grew 22.2% to AED 689 mn, according to its management discussion and analysis report (pdf). Some 95.7% of revenue is generated from multi-year contracts, giving the firm a high level of

revenue visibility and resilience even as the conflict potentially delays some agreements.

“Our customer base are sovereigns, both in the UAE and internationally, and their focus from late February onwards was very much on system resilience, operational continuity, strong data governance, and data security,” Tejwani tells us. That explains the “small delay” in contract renewals during the quarter, though he says that has reversed as of early 2Q, with a series of domestic contract renewals that helped boost current pro-forma backlog to AED 4.9 bn.

The outlook for margins is also strong: The firm guided on 23-28% EBITDA growth between this year and 2029, as it sees international operations maturing past initial infrastructure-heavy phases and towards second-generation contracts focusing on software applications and professional services, where the margin mix is more favorable, Tejwani explains. The firm also maintained its guidance for revenue growth for the period at 20-25%.