When you register a company anywhere in the world, you get a PDF. A piece of paper. Innovation City in Ras Al Khaimah decided that was not good enough. Every company that registers there now gets a living, cryptographically verifiable identity on the blockchain. Paul Dawalibi calls it giving your business a soul. Joining me is Paul Dawalibi, CEO of Innovation City. Paul, welcome back to Capital Markets Wall Street to Mena. You said we do not just register companies, we give them a soul on the blockchain. What does that actually mean?
In the sense that if you do not have this, you sort of do not exist in this future world. When I conceived Innovation City, one of the core qualities was that we would be future-proof — the tip of the innovation spear from a free zone perspective. In this AI future, especially in the UAE where governments want to be 50% driven by agentic AI, you cannot have paper documents. A business licence sitting in a drawer does not do anyone any good. An AI agent cannot interact with that. The beauty of the blockchain is it is a common language — a common database that AI agents can interact with. In the world we are moving towards where AI agents will be doing most of the work, having your business licence on the blockchain truly does make your business exist for the first time in that world. Your business licence sitting on a piece of paper in a drawer does no one any good in this AI world.
A business licence that used to be a static PDF is now a living digital asset. What can a company actually do with it that it could not before?
It takes courage to be first. It takes courage and vision to do something no one else has done — because sometimes even the use cases are not obvious. One of the reasons we did this was we knew it would unlock something completely dramatic in the free zone world. Up until now, if you got a business licence in any free zone, you would get it very quickly — everyone has solved for speed. But what no one solved for was the bank account. Sometimes you would get the business licence and the bank account would only come months later. By having everything AI-driven and AI-powered, by putting all of these documents on the blockchain so that banks can interact with them and have full transparency and full auditability — by doing all that, it unlocked the ability to provide our clients, at the same time as a business licence, a bank account. When you get a licence with Innovation City, immediately you get a bank account.
Who benefits most from that speed?
The client. Because now you can get your bank account immediately instead of having to walk into a branch, wait for someone to look over your paperwork, then have it go to a compliance officer who looks over it again — this is why you would get your bank account months later. With all that data so easily accessible and verifiable on the blockchain, it is the client who wins because of that transparency.
How does blockchain business identity help the UAE's goal of 50% of federal sectors using agentic AI?
When you are dealing with AI agents, agents need a way to communicate and transfer data to each other. You need a common language between an AI agent built at Innovation City and an AI agent built at a regulator or a bank or somewhere else. That common language is the blockchain. When Innovation City was conceived, the vision was that 80% of our entire back end operations — everything from marketing to registration to compliance — should be done by AI agents with no human intervention. That was the vision from day one.
Innovation City now has over a thousand startups. Are they actually using the blockchain identity?
They are using it as soon as they are getting a bank account — and they are using it without knowing it. By having their licence on-chain, that unlocked the capability to get the bank account immediately. Now other capabilities are coming online — the ability to make that identity available to any partner and provide a common interface for any partner to verify it. This will unlock new opportunities in terms of ecosystem marketplace capabilities, the ability to do business, open accounts, verify who you are. All of this will be dramatically easier. But ultimately the ambition is that the user never realises it. The benefit is passive — things happen faster, things get done that could not be done before, and the user does not even need to know why.
What is Innovation City building next that nobody knows about yet?
We have a huge media partnership that is going to be announced — with a very large social media platform focused on live and live streaming. This will be a first in the region. It is a partnership that is a year in the making and I think it will change the landscape of business licensing and free zones when it comes to digital creators and influencers. We think that market is underserved. It has been largely ignored. But it is a very powerful and significant market, especially in the UAE where you have lots of creators and influencers who spend lots of time on these platforms.
Thank you so much for being with us today, Paul.
Thank you so much for having me.
