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Top MENA Events in 2023

Suzanne Newman Suzanne Newman
June 2, 2023

Global Tech Summit

July 17-18 – Saudi Arabia
The Global Tech Summit 2023 is a significant event that focuses on the latest advancements and trends in various industries, including Medicine, Technology, Automobiles, Construction, Agriculture, and Food Industries. It serves as a platform for collaboration, innovation, and exploring new ideas. Attendees have the opportunity to witness demonstrations and presentations from both established companies and emerging start-ups, covering a wide range of topics. The summit brings together business leaders, political figures, and experts to discuss global issues and the role of technology in addressing them. It offers attendees the chance to stay informed about the latest technological developments across different domains and industries, network with professionals and experts, and gather inspiration and ideas for future projects and initiatives.

Digital Transformation Summit

August 9-10 – Egypt
With the aim of aligning with Egypt’s Vision 2030 and digital transformation strategy, both the private and public sectors are joining forces to lay the groundwork for Egypt’s transition into a digital society. In light of this objective, the Digital Transformation Summit is being organized in Egypt. This summit will address a broad range of topics that are crucial to this transformation, allowing leaders to delve deeply into the new economy and comprehend its implications for their businesses.The upcoming edition of the summit will bring together over 200 digital leaders, featuring a series of presentations, panel discussions, real-life use cases, and specialized industry tracks. This comprehensive program will provide participants with a holistic perspective on the current market landscape, the latest technological innovations, and strategies to drive organizational growth amidst the unique challenges of these unprecedented times.

Crypto Expo Dubai

September 20-21 – UAE
Hqmena is the organizer of Crypto Expo Dubai, an event that showcases the largest gathering of its kind in Dubai. It brings together esteemed investors and industry leaders from the cryptocurrency field, providing valuable opportunities for networking and exploring new business avenues. Attending the expo offers a chance to connect with the top cryptocurrency businesses for trading and investment purposes. Participants can also gain knowledge about various aspects of the cryptocurrency industry, including Altcoins, Blockchain, and Consensus. Hqmena excels in organizing business-to-business events, offering high-quality educational resources and networking opportunities tailored for the cryptocurrency industry. The expo puts top cryptocurrency brands in the spotlight, allowing them to present their finest digital currency products and services to thousands of traders and investors.

DevOpsDays Cairo

September 27 – Egypt
DevOpsDays is a global series of technical conferences that focus on software development, IT infrastructure operations, and the convergence of these two domains. These events are organized and run by volunteers from the local community. Typically, DevOpsDays conferences consist of a mix of curated talks, which are selected through open Calls for Proposals, and self-organized open space sessions. The topics covered in these events often revolve around automation, testing, security, and organizational culture. Participants have the opportunity to explore and discuss these subjects with industry experts, sharing insights, best practices, and experiences.

Blockchain Economy Dubai Summit

October 4-5 – UAE
The Blockchain Economy Summit, known as the world’s largest blockchain conference network, serves as a platform to unite prominent figures in the crypto industry and experts who aim to redefine the future of finance. The upcoming 8th edition of the summit is scheduled to take place over two days in Dubai on October 4-5, 2023. The event will feature the participation of leading crypto companies and blockchain entrepreneurs from around the world. Dubai, specifically the UAE, is actively positioning itself as a global crypto hub, and the Blockchain Economy Dubai Summit will serve as a significant gathering in the region, representing the blockchain and cryptocurrency world. The summit will cover a wide range of topics centered around the future of financial technologies, providing ample networking opportunities, and attracting participants from over 70 countries.

Travel Tech Middle East

October 11-12 – UAE
The 4th Annual Travel Tech Middle East Summit 2023 serves as a vital gathering point, marketplace, and knowledge hub for travel professionals from around the globe. This conference is dedicated to equipping travel industry experts with the necessary knowledge and expertise to effectively implement the latest technologies that are revolutionizing the field. The event aims to bring together hotels, online travel agencies (OTA’s), and hospitality technology companies, fostering an environment where participants can learn about operational technology and gain practical insights on leveraging recent innovations to accelerate the recovery of the travel industry on a global scale.

Devoxx Morocco

October 11-13 – Morocco
DEVOXX MOROCCO stands as the largest developer conference in the Africa & Middle East region. Its primary objective is to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and expertise between local and international technology experts, engaging technology enthusiasts in the process. This three-day conference covers a wide range of sessions on various topics, including Java, Cloud, Containers & Cloud Native technologies, DevOps & Culture, Big Data Machine Learning & AI, Modern Web, JS, UX, Architecture, Mobile, IoT, and Blockchain. Attendees have the opportunity to dive into these subjects, learning from industry leaders and gaining insights into the latest advancements and trends in the tech industry.

DigiMarCon Middle East & Dubai

October 11-12 – UAE
Another marketing event in 2023 that could potentially benefit your business is the DigiMarCon Middle East 2023. This annual event is highly regarded in the marketing industry and is considered a must-attend. It features a series of conferences with influential individuals, including CEOs, CMOs, and social media influencers, who collaborate with major brands such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, eBay, Netflix, Oracle, and others. The event offers both online and in-person attendance options, allowing participants to access a diverse range of case studies and practical strategies that can be implemented in their own workplaces. Additionally, the networking opportunities at this event are exceptional, providing you with the chance to connect with prominent leaders in the industry.

Expand North Star 2023

October 15-18 – UAE
Hosted by Dubai Chamber of Digital Economy, Expand North Star will present a new creative format to extend its engagements with tech leaders, venture capitalists, unicorns, scale-ups, startups, and key stakeholders in the tech ecosystem.

GITEX Global

October 16-20 – UAE
GITEX Global, which is internationally recognized as one of the largest tech events, has gained significant prominence. The 2022 GITEX Global event served as a promising platform for innovators, and the upcoming 2023 edition is expected to be even more dynamic. This event brings together highly knowledgeable speakers and showcases the most exciting product innovations. Regardless of whether you’re a startup founder or simply a technology enthusiast, attending this event is highly recommended. GITEX Global 2023 will primarily focus on cutting-edge topics such as 6G, Big Data, virtual business ecosystems, Metaverse, Cybersecurity, Quantum Computing, and much more. As an international tech event, GITEX Global offers a remarkable digital experience. If you happened to miss the Marketing Mania 2023 event, you can find similar content and opportunities at GITEX Global 2023!

Future Tech Event

November 27-28 – Oman
In November 2023, the 3rd Edition of the Future Tech Event will be held at the Oman Convention and Exhibition Centre in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman. Future Tech is the premier B2B and B2G technology event in the Sultanate of Oman. It serves as a significant gathering that brings together C-Level executives, industry experts, decision makers, policy makers, and government officials from various sectors. The event provides a dedicated platform for multi-stakeholder dialogue, fostering collaboration and offering powerful networking opportunities. Participants have the opportunity to engage in discussions on current challenges, explore business opportunities, devise market strategies, exchange knowledge, and seek solutions that shape the future of technology.

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Fundraising 4 hours ago

London-based AI laboratory Ineffable Intelligence has emerged from stealth with a $1.1 billion seed round at a $5.1 billion post-money valuation, the company confirmed on 27 April 2026. The financing is the largest seed round ever raised by a European company and one of the largest first-money-in rounds in the global history of artificial intelligence. The round was co-led by Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Participating investors included Nvidia, DST Global, Index Ventures, Google, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund, the British government’s recently established vehicle for backing strategic AI capacity on home soil. A bet on a different path to general intelligence Ineffable Intelligence was founded in 2025 by David Silver, the former Vice President of Reinforcement Learning at Google DeepMind and the principal architect of AlphaGo, AlphaZero and AlphaStar. He is joined by three further DeepMind alumni: Wojciech Czarnecki, Lasse Espeholt and Junhyuk Oh. All four have spent the past decade at the frontier of reinforcement learning research, the discipline behind some of the most consequential demonstrations of machine learning over the past ten years. The company describes its objective as building a “superlearner” — an AI system capable of acquiring knowledge directly from its own experience rather than from human-generated text or imagery. “Our mission is to make first contact with superintelligence,” Silver said in a statement accompanying the launch. “We are creating a superlearner that discovers all knowledge from its own experience, from elementary motor skills through to profound intellectual breakthroughs.” The framing is a deliberate departure from the dominant industry trajectory. Most leading AI laboratories, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind itself, have built large language models trained primarily on the corpus of the internet, then refined that training with human feedback. Ineffable’s wager is that the marginal returns on scaling text-based pretraining are diminishing and that the next leap in capability will come from agents that learn endlessly from the consequences of their own actions, in much the same way AlphaZero learnt the game of Go without studying any human matches. Why $1.1 billion at seed The size of the round is unusual even by the inflated standards of the 2026 AI capital cycle. Two factors appear to explain it. First, frontier reinforcement learning at the scale Ineffable describes is computationally extraordinarily expensive: the company will need to operate vast simulation environments and train very large models against them, an undertaking that consumes capital at a rate closer to physical R&D than to traditional software. Second, the round signals a strategic move by Europe’s investor and policy ecosystems to retain the most ambitious AI researchers on the continent. The presence of the UK Sovereign AI Fund alongside Sequoia, Lightspeed and Nvidia is the clearest expression of that intent. The British government has publicly framed the investment as a bet on breakthrough AI that “can discover new knowledge”, positioning the country as a willing co-investor in domestic frontier laboratories. For Ineffable, the implication is access not only to capital but to compute, regulatory engagement and the still-resilient academic talent base around UCL, Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial. Founder pledge of historic scale Alongside the funding announcement, Silver disclosed that he is committing 100 per cent of any personal proceeds from his Ineffable equity to charity via the Founders Pledge network — described by the organisation as the largest pledge in its history. At the round’s $5.1 billion valuation, that commitment could ultimately exceed several billion dollars if the company succeeds. It is a meaningful gesture in a sector where the reputational stakes around concentrated AI wealth are escalating, and one likely to be referenced in subsequent founder-led commitments. Implications for the European AI landscape Ineffable’s emergence reshapes the European AI map in three concrete ways. It establishes London as the home of the continent’s largest-ever seed-stage company, complicating Paris’s recent narrative of frontier-AI primacy after Mistral’s earlier rounds. It validates a thesis — that reinforcement learning, not transformer scaling, is the next frontier — that has lately been losing capital share to language-model incumbents. And it confirms that the UK government is now willing to act as a balance-sheet co-investor in domestic AI laboratories, a posture much closer to the French model than to the predominantly grant-based regimes elsewhere in Europe. The execution risk is non-trivial. Reinforcement learning at frontier scale has historically required years of careful environment design before producing competitive systems, and Ineffable’s “first contact” framing sets a high bar against which it will be judged. But for now, with a billion dollars on the balance sheet, four of the discipline’s most accomplished researchers in the founding team and a sovereign co-investor at its back, Ineffable Intelligence is the most heavily resourced new entrant in the European AI cycle. Sesamers covers European fundraising rounds across deeptech, fintech and AI. Source: tech.eu.

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