You are reading Entrepreneur Middle East, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.
As we see how innovation fuels every facet of our lives, it’s interesting to learn more about the brilliant minds who work tirelessly behind the scenes to make it all possible. In this article, we get an inside look at the journey of qeen.ai, a Dubai-based startup that helps e-commerce companies grow with proprietary sales-focused AI solutions, to learn more about how its founders are leading these visionary projects.
qeen.ai was launched in 2023 by a team of ex-Google employees who brought an exceptional mix of expertise in artificial intelligence (AI), product development and startup and business track record to the project – Morteza Ibrahimi, co-founder and CEO , Dina Alsamhan, Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer, and Ahmed Khwileh, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer.
Alsamhan explains that the trio met while working at Google, and as AI quickly entered the picture, the trio collectively became very excited about how this rapidly evolving technology could fundamentally reshape the core of how online sellers run their businesses. shaping. Because their skills were highly complementary, they decided to launch qeen.ai. “We started in MENA because we want to contribute to the idea that real innovation and deep tech can come from the region,” says Ibrahimi.
Today, qeen.ai technology helps ecommerce businesses grow with proprietary sales-focused AI solutions that are easy to implement. “These solutions are based on AI agents, a type of AI that can learn from interacting with its environment and make decisions autonomously to achieve a specific goal,” Khwileh adds. “Our focus is on building domain expert agents that intelligently automate operational functions across the sales funnel that today are largely manual and/or performed in silos. Not only can these agents automate and optimize existing processes, they will also enable completely new ways of sell online.”
Source: queen.ai
In a short time, the qeen.ai team has managed to achieve some major milestones, including raising $2.2 million in a pre-seed round in the last quarter of 2023, expanding their team to 22 employees and launching the qeen.ai content agent that generates product content that optimizes for sales in 2024, which, Alsamhan explains, is “currently achieving +30% lift on add-to-carts.” Speaking about their future plans, Alsamhan says: “We are excited to complement our dynamic content solution by expanding the reach of our agents to address broader challenges in the sales funnel. We are currently working on an interactive sales agent that will be able to intelligently handle customer queries and present highly relevant product options to them. And over the course of 2025, we want to cover more and more crucial parts of the sales funnel, such as customer acquisition.”
Khwileh adds that part of qeen.ai’s success is due to the fact that effective AI solutions are currently in high demand. “From the many conversations we’re having with various stakeholders, we’re seeing so much excitement about AI across the board: investors are looking for the right, defensible opportunities that can have global potential, and companies are hungry for the right AI solutions that can be tangible. help them grow and solve business challenges,” he explains. “This creates fertile ground for innovative companies that have the ability to identify the most salient pain points and build effective solutions to solve them.”
Summarizing their experiences building qeen.ai so far, Ibrahimi believes it’s crucial to really enjoy what you’re doing. “Building a startup is very difficult and it’s not worth it if you don’t enjoy the journey and have a purpose beyond just the potential monetary reward,” says Ibrahimi. “We only hire the people we respect and who can bring something new to the team. We have an experimentation and iteration mentality and are open to adapting our plans based on the market feedback. We are happy to talk with as many people and companies as possible to keep a fresh perspective on where challenges and opportunities lie. We know where we want to go, but are aware that the road to get there is not set in stone.”
‘TREP TALK: qeen.ai’s Chief Business Officer Dina Alsamhan advises entrepreneurs
Focus as much as you can “You can’t do everything you’d like to do, so you have to be ruthless in the way you prioritize and use the resources available; and divide and conquer where possible – it helps to have a team of being three co-founders.
Be comfortable with your scope being “flexible” for a while “Anyone who joins the company, especially in the early stages, must not only be comfortable with ambiguity, but must be able to thrive in it.”
It’s all about the people “If you can find partners who share your values and complement your skills, don’t go it alone. An inordinate amount of time is spent recruiting talent.”
