Meet the young Emirati woman making waves in Silicon Valley

Maryam Al Abbar, a 22-year-old Emirati entrepreneur, has co-founded two technology companies — Carbon2Capital and ReachLLM — and taken her team from a university investment competition in Dubai to start-up programmes in the UK and Silicon Valley, where they joined Founders Inc. Carbon2Capital is an AI-driven carbon footprint calculation firm, and ReachLLM is an AI platform designed to help businesses understand and improve their visibility across large language models.

“One thing which I learnt from my mother is don’t be afraid to try,” Ms Al Abbar said, adding that her mother gave her “a timeline of two years” to succeed before considering a conventional job. “If you don’t try, you don’t know if it would work or if it wouldn’t.”

From campus challenge to start-up programmes

Ms Al Abbar’s entrepreneurial journey began at Zayed University in Dubai, where she and three fellow students entered the Bloomberg Challenge, an investment competition that let them experiment with virtual money and revealed how they handled risk. That cohort — whose members come from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Brazil — went on to launch Carbon2Capital as their first venture.

Carbon2Capital joined several start-up programmes, including initiatives run by Dubai SME, and later moved to the UK after being selected for an international start-up programme. It was during that period the founders began work on ReachLLM, focusing on businesses’ discoverability and performance across large language models.

• Companies: Carbon2Capital (AI-driven carbon footprint calculation) and ReachLLM (AI platform for LLM visibility)
• Founding team: Maryam Al Abbar and three co-founders from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Brazil
• Programmes and accelerators: Bloomberg Challenge, Dubai SME, an international UK start-up programme, Founders Inc (Silicon Valley)

Moving to Silicon Valley and being accepted into Founders Inc accelerated the business. Ms Al Abbar said the company’s annual recurring revenue “grew sharply during its first weeks there and ultimately exceeded the team’s expectations.” Yet the experience also forced her to build confidence in rooms where few people resembled her background.

“I think I was beyond blessed to be Emirati and a woman,” she said. “At the beginning, it does feel like a drawback because you feel like, ‘I am out of place.’ You kind of have to build that courage of going ahead and introducing yourself.” She acknowledged moments of self-doubt when meeting senior investors and executives: “Sometimes you’re in a room where you feel small… I’m sitting across people that are way up the ranks, have worked their whole lives, and they’re big decision-makers. And we’re sitting in the same meeting.”

Ms Al Abbar described an encounter with an investor who dismissed her and a fellow female co-founder as “too romantic” when they outlined ambitious plans — an experience that strengthened her resolve rather than deterred her.

Outlook

Ms Al Abbar says her broader ambition is to see an Emirati entrepreneur — ideally an Emirati woman — build a billion-dollar technology company that can compete internationally. “Have the audacity to dare,” she told the next generation. “You are worth so much more than what you think. You need to have the audacity to walk into the room and tell them what you feel, or tell them what you’re building.”

Her co-founders remind her of rapid progress: “It took you this short amount of time to be in the same room that they’re in,” they tell her. For now, Ms Al Abbar intends to keep building: “If you don’t try, you don’t know if it would work or if it wouldn’t.”