Meet Bahrain’s PROCODE, an AI-native e-sports platform

Bahrain-based startup PROCODE, founded in 2024 by CEO Shahd AlZaki and co-founder Rami Jamal, is building an AI-native operating system for competitive gaming that aims to consolidate tournaments, coaching, payments and related operations into a single platform. The company has raised a pre-seed round and received grant capital from the Standard Chartered Foundation’s Women in Tech Accelerator, and says its platform is already being used by thousands across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

“Ultimately, our vision is to connect the entire esports journey in one place,” Shahd AlZaki told MENAStartups in an interview, outlining PROCODE’s ambition to address fragmentation across the competitive gaming value chain.

Product and market context

PROCODE’s platform is organised around four core areas — Compete, Train, Pay and Deploy — designed to let organisers run tournaments, leagues and multi-season circuits; enable players to access verified coaches and AI-powered VOD analysis; handle payments and prize distributions; and let organisations deploy PROCODE as white-label solutions via APIs, single sign-on and analytics. AlZaki said the startup is building AI agents “to automate much of the manual administration involved.”

The company’s research points to persistent inefficiencies in the esports ecosystem: it estimates that 49% of tournaments globally are managed manually, and that coaches can spend about a quarter of their time on administrative tasks. PROCODE also places MENA’s competitive player base at more than US$100 million within an estimated global market of roughly US$540 million.

• Founded: 2024 (Bahrain)
• Founders: Shahd AlZaki (CEO) and Rami Jamal
• Users and activity to date: 4,000 users, seven coaches, 10 tournaments managed
• Ambassador network: three brand ambassadors and three creators across MENA with a combined following of more than 550,000

Support, traction and regional strategy

PROCODE has both B2B and B2C business models and is targeting the GCC and wider MENA as its initial market, with the stated intention of proving the model regionally before expanding globally: “Our approach is therefore simple: prove it in MENA, build it for the world,” AlZaki said.

The startup emphasises regional product fit: rather than adding Arabic as a translation layer, PROCODE is being developed as an Arabic-native product with right-to-left functionality and payment infrastructure tailored to MENA-native payment rails. Uptake has been encouraging, the team says, with engagement coming from organisers, coaches and creator communities as well as players.

PROCODE attributes part of its early momentum to participation in the Standard Chartered Foundation’s Women in Tech Accelerator, implemented locally by Innovate for Bahrain with support from Village Capital. On that support, AlZaki said: “The grant prize supported us in further platform development and hiring to grow our team. We would recommend the programme as the one-on-one mentoring was very beneficial, being part of a community that can support you is very important, and the prize money can support a startup that has just started on its journey.”

Outlook

With a product stack that combines tournament management, coaching operations, payments and analytics, PROCODE is positioning itself as an operating system to reduce manual work and data fragmentation in esports. The company plans to deepen its foothold across MENA while preparing its platform — including APIs, white-label options and AI automation — for wider international expansion once regional product-market fit is proven.