Qadi partners with Core42 to build a sovereign AI compliance platform for the Middle East

Dubai-based legal tech startup Qadi has partnered with Core42, a subsidiary of G42, to power what it describes as the region’s first sovereign, AI-driven regulatory compliance platform.

The partnership follows Qadi’s pre-seed funding round led by Incubayt and reflects a specific constraint the company is trying to solve for: operating AI systems inside legal and regulatory environments that do not permit data to leave national jurisdictions.

Under the agreement, Qadi will run its workloads on Core42’s Sovereign Public Cloud, built on Microsoft Azure and governed locally through Core42’s Insight layer. Data storage, model training, and AI compute will remain fully within the UAE, aligned with in-country data residency and regulatory requirements.

This restriction is not framed as a compromise. It is central to Qadi’s product design.

From legal software to compliance execution

Qadi is deliberately distancing itself from the growing category of AI copilots aimed at legal professionals. Rather than assisting with drafting or summarisation, the company is building systems that attempt to encode local laws, regulations, and internal policies into AI agents that can carry out compliance checks as part of day-to-day business workflows.

According to the company, these agents can take on first-pass contract reviews for documents such as NDAs and MSAs, assess marketing materials against regional financial promotion rules, and introduce compliance checks earlier in operational processes. The platform is designed specifically for MENAT legal systems, where regulations are often fragmented across authorities, languages vary, and sector-specific rules make generic legal AI tools difficult to rely on.

“Partnering with Core42 gives us the infrastructure we need to operate confidently at scale,” said Mohamad El Charif, founder of Qadi. “We aren't just building a copilot; we’re building the engine for compliance automation.”

That distinction matters because it places Qadi’s AI much closer to regulatory risk. Systems that execute or enforce compliance are held to a different standard than tools that merely assist professionals.

Sovereignty as a design requirement

Core42’s role underscores a reality facing many AI companies operating in the region. For legal, financial, and government-linked institutions, the question is often not whether AI is useful, but whether it can be deployed without triggering jurisdictional or regulatory conflicts.

Global SaaS AI platforms frequently fall short on this front. Data may be processed outside national borders, or become subject to foreign legal regimes, making them unsuitable for compliance-heavy use cases. For platforms like Qadi, which deal directly with sensitive legal documents and regulatory interpretations, those constraints are decisive.

“The legal sector has long needed tools that reflect the region’s requirements,” said Mohammed Retmi, Vice President of Sovereign Public Cloud at Core42. “Working with Qadi allows us to apply our cloud and AI capabilities in an area where data protection and regulatory alignment are not optional.”

Sovereignty here is less about branding and more about governance: who controls access, how models are audited, and which legal framework applies if systems fail or disputes arise.

Why this matters

This partnership does not, on its own, signal a wholesale transformation of legal or compliance work in the Middle East. What it does show is where some of the region’s AI experimentation is now concentrating.

Instead of focusing on productivity tools at the edges of professional work, Qadi is targeting compliance functions that sit close to regulators, banks, and government-linked institutions. That choice only makes sense if there is at least some appetite among customers to place AI systems inside regulated workflows, provided the infrastructure aligns with local legal norms.

It also reflects a broader infrastructure trend. Rather than relying exclusively on global AI platforms, the region is building vertically integrated stacks that combine local cloud infrastructure, governance layers, and application-level software designed for regional law and policy environments.

For Qadi, the bet is that trust in AI will come less from model sophistication and more from jurisdictional alignment. For Core42, the partnership extends its push to make sovereign cloud infrastructure usable not just for governments, but for regulated private-sector applications as well.

Whether this model scales beyond early adopters remains uncertain. But the direction is clear. In the Middle East, the future of enterprise AI will be shaped as much by where systems live and who controls them as by what the models can do.