Perk lands in Abu Dhabi as GCC business travel meets AI ambition

Perk, the AI-native travel and spend management platform formerly known as TravelPerk, has opened a regional office in Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) in partnership with the Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO). The move formalises what the company describes as a long-term bet on the GCC as a convergence point for enterprise software, business mobility and sovereign AI strategy, a combination increasingly attracting platform businesses that can serve the region's rapidly internationalising mid-market.

The timing is deliberate. The UAE has set a target for AI to contribute 20% of non-oil GDP by 2031, a commitment that has already reshaped where technology companies choose to anchor regional operations. For Perk, the calculus is equally commercial: the UAE is its ninth-largest market globally by travel spend, and the company is targeting a tripling of that figure from UAE-headquartered customers by 2028. The broader UAE business travel market is projected to reach $94 billion by 2030, according to figures cited in the release, with SMBs and mid-market businesses identified as the least-served segment.

Revenue momentum and the AI-native pitch

Perk's Abu Dhabi announcement arrives on the back of 48% revenue growth in 2025, with the company approaching $400 million in annualised revenue. That trajectory provides the balance-sheet confidence to fund physical regional infrastructure rather than remote-selling from London, where the company was founded in 2015.

The "AI-native" positioning is central to how Perk differentiates itself from legacy corporate travel management companies. The platform automates end-to-end workflows across travel booking, expense processing, invoice management and corporate events, what the company markets internally as eliminating "Shadow Work," a category it quantifies at 7 hours of lost productivity per employee per week. Avi Meir, CEO and co-founder, framed the strategic fit directly: "The UAE has made AI central to its national strategy, and that ambition mirrors exactly what Perk is built for. We are an AI-native platform, and Abu Dhabi is clearly seeking to become an AI-native market."

Alessandro Borgogna, Chief Cluster Planning and Development Officer at ADIO, pointed to broader structural demand: "Companies want better control over travel, expenses and mobility across multiple markets. That creates significant opportunities for travel and spend management and technology platforms that can serve international businesses at scale."

The convergence read-across: sovereign AI strategy meets enterprise SaaS

The Perk opening is a small but instructive data point in a larger pattern. Gulf sovereign bodies are not merely building AI infrastructure for its own sake; they are using regulatory and investment architecture, ADGM's English Common Law framework, ADIO's partnership incentives, to pull in the enterprise software layer that will run on top of that infrastructure. For cross-sector investors, this represents a deliberate attempt to compress decades of enterprise-software ecosystem development into a single policy cycle.

The implications extend beyond travel tech. As GCC states compete to attract globally scalable platform businesses, the model being stress-tested in Abu Dhabi, sovereign investment office as anchor partner, international financial centre as legal wrapper, national AI strategy as demand signal, is likely to be replicated across verticals from logistics to legal-tech. Capital allocators watching the region should note that the entry point for Western SaaS businesses is increasingly the ADIO partnership structure rather than traditional distribution deals, shifting where early commercial risk is underwritten.

For Perk specifically, the Abu Dhabi office connects the company to an investor and partner ecosystem it will need if it pursues a capital event, the company has not publicly disclosed IPO plans, but its revenue trajectory and international expansion cadence are consistent with a business preparing optionality for public markets within the next two to three years.