The UAE’s premier annual event on food security convincingly demonstrates that the region’s agricultural transformation is now a tangible reality. Amid the region’s biggest farming initiatives, the Emirates Agriculture Conference and Exhibition 2026 in Al Ain is where ambition meets the future.
Three startups launching on opening day provide a revealing snapshot of AI’s current state in UAE agriculture. Each operates at a different level of the same challenge, and all have reached the same realisation: mastering the technology is just the beginning.
The Intelligence Gap:
Ask the CEO of INNOfarms.ai what problem he is solving, and he will give you two answers, because the company sits in the middle of a two-sided problem.
Large food enterprises depend on hundreds of farms for supply, but have no real-time visibility of any of them. Procurement is done on guesswork, while produce gets wasted in transit, leading to millions in losses for farmers and buyers alike.
INNOfarms.ai’s platform, anchored by an AI layer called Aura, pulls together data from farm sensors, retail pricing feeds, and supply chain systems into a single conversational interface. “What is the price for my lettuce in Dubai today?” asks Brajendra Yadav, the company’s Founder and CEO. “Aura gives you the full trend. You plan what to grow now.”
The company built a model farm in the UAE to train its systems on local conditions, running real crops for a full year before deploying to partner farms. On the enterprise side, it is delivering procurement savings of 20 to 30 percent. For individual farms operating on quarterly budgets of around AED 50,000, operational savings fall within the same range, with yields improving simultaneously.
Traditional agricultural tech often forced farms offline for months during deployment. INNOfarms.ai is built for phased adoption instead, letting farms bring in one module at a time and measure the return before going further.
“They want to see the value before they see the price,” Yadav says.
What the Soil Knows:
Soyl Food is making its debut in Al Ain. The company’s biostimulant, derived from marine algae and optimised using AI, was first tested on company-owned farms in Pakistan in conditions reaching 50 degrees Celsius, comparable to a UAE summer. The results were a 35 percent increase in vegetable yields and measurable improvement in soil microbial activity across growing cycles, founder Zunaira Danish says.
The microbial improvement matters as much as the yield gain. Most agricultural inputs are designed to extract from the land while Soyl Food’s product is designed to restore it.
“The real purpose is to heal the soil,” Danish says.
An IoT probe makes that case visible. It monitors moisture and microbial activity in real time, giving farmers a before-and-after comparison that turns an invisible biological process into a number on a screen, which, for a traditionally skeptical farming community, is often the only argument that lands.
Meanwhile, four-month-old startup Raee is working on a problem that has nothing to do with AI and yet everything to do with it. Many livestock farms across the Gulf still run on paper records, phone calls, and WhatsApp groups. Missed health interventions, lost lineage data, and procurement calls made on unreliable headcounts translate into compounding costs. Named after the Arabic word for shepherd, Raee is a livestock management app built specifically for the halal sector, and it starts by replacing those paper records with something that actually works, says Systems Analyst Moaz AbdEldayem.
What distinguishes it from a generic farm management tool is the depth of its animal-level data architecture. Each animal in the system carries a complete profile from photographs to notes, weight records to health history and bloodline tree, all linked via RFID chip to physical identification in the field. For a livestock owner managing a serious breeding programme, it is the difference between a professional operation and an expensive hobby managed on gut feeling.
The interface is designed for the person standing in the field, not just the owner reviewing records from an office. In a sector where farm workers come from diverse language backgrounds and technology literacy varies widely, that distinction matters.
“Operations can be reviewed and approved by supervisors within the platform,” AbdEldayem says. “That’s an accountability layer paper records simply cannot provide.”
A number of farms across the UAE are already running on Raee, said AbdEldayem. The startup was here in Al Ain to extend that footprint into the livestock farming community that needs it most.
The Same Problem, Three Approaches:
INNOfarms.ai is building enterprise-grade market intelligence for operations that already have the capacity to absorb it. Soyl Food is translating complex agroscience into a probe and a mobile dashboard, on the conviction that simplicity is the prerequisite for field adoption. Raee is digitising the foundational record-keeping layer that has to exist before any higher-order intelligence can function. Three different entry points, but the same destination ensure a more connected, more legible food system for the UAE.
The probe in the soil, the dashboard on the phone, the bloodline tree that tells a breeder exactly where his prize animal came from, this is what that value chain looks like from the ground up.
