Analysis · 11 September 2026 · 4 min read
The register needed three tiers because one would have been a lie. Trace the registrations behind the Lebanese AI companies everyone cites and you arrive in Abu Dhabi, Vienna, Sharjah, Tokyo, New York, and a fund domiciled in Luxembourg.
I set out to build a public list of Lebanese AI companies and ran straight into a question I could not answer in one word. What makes a company Lebanese.
The register has one rule above all others. If I cannot open a page a stranger could also open, showing the claim I am making, the entry does not go up. Applying that rule to the word Lebanese, rather than to the funding figures, turned out to be the harder half of the job.
Anghami was founded in Beirut in November 2012 by Elie Habib and Eddy Maroun. In 2021 it moved its headquarters to Abu Dhabi, inside the Abu Dhabi Global Market and supported by the Abu Dhabi Investment Office. On 4 February 2022 it began trading on NASDAQ under the ticker ANGH. Beirut is still an office. It has not been the head office for five years.
Medicus AI is routinely listed elsewhere as a Lebanese company. Its own about page says it was founded in 2016 in Vienna, gives Vienna as headquarters, and lists Vienna, Berlin, Paris, Beirut and Dubai as offices. Forbes Middle East gives the founding year as 2016 as well, but records the founding country as the UAE and Austria, names three founders where the about page names two, and puts total funding at 7.4 million dollars. The sources disagree about where this company started, which is worth saying out loud rather than smoothing over. What is not in dispute is that the Lebanese connection runs through a founder, Nadine Nehme, rather than through an address.
Ramp is a New York company. Karim Atiyeh, born and raised in Lebanon, has been its Co-CEO since 25 June 2026, announced on Ramp's own blog by Eric Glyman in a post that opens by saying the two of them are both taking new titles as Co-CEOs. Most Lebanese coverage still calls him CTO.
Integral AI lists two locations on its own site, Tokyo and Silicon Valley. Jad Tarifi, born and raised in Lebanon, is named there as CEO and Co-founder. Bounty is registered in New York, co-founded by Rayan Dabbagh, who left the Grand Lycee Franco Libanais in Beirut at seventeen.
Mouwaten's map covers Lebanon and nothing else. The company that publishes it is registered in Sharjah.
Mouwaten is a live public safety map for Lebanon. It classifies incidents from Lebanese public sources and plots them with a source and a confidence level: airstrikes, shelling, gunfire, evacuation warnings, road closures, protests, fires. Arabic and English. No account needed, no location tracking, no ads.
Its contact page states that Mouwaten is operated by Mouwaten FZE, based in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. No founder is named anywhere on the site.
By registration it is Emirati. By every line of what it actually does, it is Lebanese. The register files it under Lebanon, and the reason is that here the product is the evidence. That is a judgement call, it is written on the card rather than hidden, and anyone is free to argue with it in public.
LAIN, the Lebanese Angel Investors Network, launched in Beirut on 11 May 2026. It is run by BY Venture Partners, founded by the brothers Ghaith and Abdallah Yafi, as an initiative of the Ministry of Technology and Artificial Intelligence. Dr Kamal Shehadi, Minister of Technology and Artificial Intelligence, opened it, while stating that the ministry holds no role in directing where investments go. Beirut Digital District reported five million dollars in soft commitments at launch.
The investment vehicle is domiciled in Luxembourg.
A network built to move diaspora money towards Lebanese founders is structured outside Lebanon. That is not a scandal and I do not write it as one. Given the banking system, the capital controls and the question of legal certainty, it is the rational choice, and it is the same choice the companies above made. It is simply the part nobody reads out alongside the headline number.
The register carries three. Lebanon for companies run from Lebanon or built for Lebanon. Diaspora for companies with a Lebanese founder and a foreign base. Capital for the money, which behaves differently enough to deserve its own lane.
One tier would have been easier and it would have produced a far better looking sector. Count Ramp as Lebanese and Lebanese AI acquires a company valued in the billions. Count Anghami as Lebanese and it acquires a NASDAQ listing. Neither sentence would survive being read by anyone who checked.
The cost of blurring that line is not paid by the diaspora companies, which are doing perfectly well. It is paid by the founders still in Beirut, who end up measured against a sector whose achievements were largely earned elsewhere, with capital and courts and banks they cannot reach from here.
Every entry on the register carries its tier, its sources, and the date it was checked. Where a claim comes from the company rather than from a third party, it says so. Where sources disagree, as they do on Medicus, both are shown rather than merged.
Sources
Written for Club Cedro. If something here is wrong, say so and it gets corrected with the correction left visible.
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