Presight bets on an international rebound in 4Q after a domestic-heavy 3Q, as defense and agentic AI gain traction

AI-powered data analytics firm Presight AI Holding expects international momentum to pick up again in 4Q 2026 following a quarter driven almost entirely by domestic work, Senior Director of Investor Relations Roger Tejwani tells EnterpriseAM. Group revenue rose 14.7% y-o-y to AED 749.2 mn in 3Q 2026, while net income after tax climbed 31% to AED 144.5 mn, according to the company’s management discussion and analysis report (pdf). EBITDA rose 27.7% y-o-y to AED 168.3 mn, with the margin widening 228 bps to 22.5%.

International revenue fell 73.7% y-o-y to AED 79 mn in 3Q, by our math, making up just 10.5% of group revenue, down from 46% a year earlier and 23.5% in 2Q. Domestic revenue nearly doubled to AED 670.2 mn over the same period. In the first nine months of the year, international revenue dropped 20.2% to AED 453.3 mn, accounting for 21.1% of the total top line.

The firm still expects international markets to bring in 25-30% of full-year revenue, and its medium-term ambition of drawing roughly half of revenue from abroad is “still intact,” Tejwani says. The decline in the past quarter is more a function of timing: international contracts are multi-year sovereign programs, where contracting, financing, and mobilization can stretch across several reporting periods. Presight also builds in extra safeguards abroad — around regulatory jurisdiction and compliance, and through financing agreements set up separately from the commercial contracts to limit credit, currency, and liquidity risk — all of which take time to put in place, Tejwani says.

Order intake slowed sharply in the quarter: New orders came in at just AED 300 mn in 3Q, and the order backlog slipped to AED 4.4 bn from AED 4.9 bn at the end of June, though it is still up 19.4% y-o-y. Tejwani points to the nine-month view instead: Presight booked AED 3.2 bn in new orders, up c. 30% y-o-y and roughly 1.5x the revenue it recognized over the period — a book-to-bill ratio he calls “pretty healthy.”

Swings from one quarter to the next are built into the model, Tejwani says. Presight typically runs 20-25 national-scale projects at once, and revenue and margins shift depending on whether those projects are in heavier, lower-margin infrastructure phases or higher-margin software and platform rollouts. 3Q leaned toward software, which lifted margins, he says.

On a nine-month basis, the firm is “very much in line” with its medium-term guidance, Tejwani says. Revenue rose 23.6% y-o-y to AED 2.2 bn in 9M 2026, EBITDA grew 24.8% to AED 471 mn, and net income after tax increased 23.5% to AED 395.2 mn. Presight targets organic revenue growth of 20-25% a year through 2029.

The international pipeline

Several African agreements already have commercial terms agreed and are now going through financing, Tejwani says, while smart city talks in Montenegro and government discussions in Malaysia and Vietnam are progressing.

Presight is also moving into more developed markets: Presight signed an MoU with Greece’s Digital Governance Ministry in October to explore AI-powered monitoring of municipal waste, water networks, and transport safety. The projects will be built to EU standards, which Tejwani says shows the firm’s UAE-built technology can scale beyond the markets it has historically served.

AIQ began its first international commercial deployment in India during the quarter and is running pilots in eight other energy markets. That international traction is “now starting to come through in a more meaningful way,” Tejwani says.

Looking ahead

Agentic AI is “front and center” of the domestic business and played a big role in 3Q’s growth, though Presight doesn’t break out agentic revenue separately, Tejwani says. Demand is being driven by the UAE government’s mandate to run 50% of government services on agentic AI within two years. New agreements that landed during and after the quarter include one with the Abu Dhabi Hazardous Materials Management Center to use agentic AI for risk detection and monitoring, and an MoU with Scale AI on agent building, evaluation, and governance.

Defense is starting to register too: Non-kinetic defense made up some 5-10% of 3Q revenue — “meaningful, not necessarily material” — and Presight may have more to announce at IDEX early next year, Tejwani says.

REMEMBER- Defense has climbed up Presight’s priority list over the year. Tejwani told us in May that the firm planned to expand its defense tech stack and sharpen its focus on domestic resilience as the regional conflict put national security front and center, seeing plenty of non-kinetic use cases it could scale into mission-critical solutions. By 2Q, it had landed its first two federal non-kinetic defense contracts, built around integrating databases — including across the Defense Ministry — to support real-time decisions on supply chain logistics and joint manpower operations.

The SME push will take longer. The marketplace that will let SMEs order and access AI tools under Presight’s MoU with the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce and Industry is still being built, and Tejwani expects the rollout to ramp up in phases through 2027. The goal is to roll it out to more than 100k SMEs in the emirate.