1001, a company building sovereign AI for critical infrastructure, has raised £22 million in a Series A round led by Lux Capital. Sanabil Investments, 9Yards and Hanabi joined the round, while existing backers General Catalyst, CIV and Stanford AI researcher Chris Ré all increased their commitments. A number of regional and global angel investors also backed the firm, including Karim Atiyeh, Kareem Amin, Russell Kaplan, Shayan Shafii, Daniel Garber and Junaid Hussain.
Operators across critical infrastructure sectors currently make thousands of high-stakes decisions under pressure without a unified or intelligent system to make them consistently and at scale. Sitting above the systems an operator already runs, 1001's technology builds a live working model of the operation itself, covering every asset, process, dependency and constraint. Rather than simply showing what is happening, the system identifies what is about to go wrong and what to do about it, recommending or executing the best action earlier and faster than was previously possible. Ownership and governance of the systems remain local, so clients retain full control of infrastructure they cannot afford to have switched off. The technology applies to any high-value operational problem across sectors including aviation, ports and logistics, energy, industrials and manufacturing.
Founded in 2025 by Bilal Abu-Ghazaleh, 1001 draws technical talent from institutions including Yale, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon. In October 2025, the company closed a $9 million seed round led by CIV, General Catalyst and Lux Capital, along with other investors. Previous angel backers include Amjad Masad of Replit, Amira Sajwani of DAMAC, Khalid Bin Bader Al Saud of RAED Ventures, and Hisham Al-Falih of Lean Technologies.
The new funding will be used to expand 1001's engineering team and strengthen its commercial, sales and go-to-market operations across key GCC markets, as demand for sovereign AI infrastructure continues to grow. According to McKinsey, broader AI adoption could add up to $150 billion to GCC economies, around 9% of combined GDP, with critical infrastructure among the highest-value opportunities.
The GCC runs some of the world's most important infrastructure, managing a significant share of global oil flows, container traffic and international aviation. Business leaders here don't just want pilots. They want sovereign systems that deliver measurable results and make thousands of real-time decisions they can trust. This is the work we've set out to do, and this round lets us go deeper and bring the best local and global talent to it.
Bilal and the 1001 team are exactly the kind of founders we take pride in backing: mission-driven, technically world-class, and building in one of the most consequential environments anywhere. They are proving that frontier AI for critical infrastructure can be built, owned and governed locally, rather than imported from abroad. We are especially proud to lead this round and to partner with 1001 as it helps the GCC build not just AI, but the capability to run its most important systems.
GCC economies are investing at unprecedented scale in data, compute and infrastructure, and the focus now is on building local capability to operate these assets with trusted AI. We believe 1001 is well positioned to become a key sovereign AI partner for institutions across all critical infrastructure.
