Model ML, the agentic operating system for financial and professional services, is expanding in the Middle East with a new Dubai office and the appointment of Raghav Sehgal as General Manager for the region.
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Opening at the end of September, the office will serve as Model ML’s base for expansion across the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region of the Middle East, with a focus on banks, sovereign wealth funds and family offices.
Sehgal brings experience spanning financial services, private equity and technology having spent four years in Bain & Company’s private equity practice across London and San Francisco. Before that he worked in various previous roles at Merrill Lynch and in the venture capital and growth equity industry, before completing an MBA at Harvard Business School and joining Model ML. At Model ML, Sehgal was one of the earliest employees, joining shortly after the company emerged from stealth as the Founding GTM for EMEA. He is currently the Head of GTM for Model ML’s Consulting and Private Markets verticals.
Driven by escalating demand for secure model-agnostic platforms, Model ML has expanded its regional footprint to include sovereign wealth funds and major investment banks - including Awad Capital, a DFSA-regulated investment bank based in Dubai - with several other tier-one institutions in active talks. Moving beyond initial market education, the company’s platform now serves as core infrastructure. Its model-agnostic approach is used for automating complex research, due diligence, and financial modeling by dynamically routing tasks to the optimal AI model to balance performance, security, and cost. In the region, Model ML is already serving regional investment banks and the UAE's leading sovereign wealth fund. It also has a robust late-stage pipeline of banks and sovereign wealth funds that have shown strong interest in acquiring its Agent OS.
Chaz Englander, co-founder and CEO of Model ML, said: “The Middle East is moving incredibly quickly on AI. A year ago we were explaining why model orchestration mattered. Today banks and sovereign investors are coming to us already knowing they need a specialist AI layer built for financial services. Opening in Dubai and having Raghav on the ground is about being close to those institutions as adoption accelerates.”
Raghav Sehgal, General Manager for the Middle East at Model ML, said: "In the GCC, trust and relationships are everything. Over the past six months we have deliberately prioritised depth over breadth, building close partnerships with a small number of leading institutions before scaling. That approach is paying off, and we are now seeing strong pull from banks, sovereign wealth funds and family offices across the region. Being on the ground in the UAE lets us meet that demand and shape the product around how institutions here actually work. I'm excited to lead Model ML's growth in the Middle East."
Ziad Awad, Founder and CEO of Awad Capital, said: “Awad Capital’s pipeline and deal activity have never been stronger, and the advisory work behind it has never been more demanding. We are using Model ML to turn prompts into advanced documentation drafts or to review and extract data from massive data rooms at 10X the speed. It is changing how our team works, with huge gains in productivity and quality of work, allowing us to do more with the same human resources. I’ve used their product personally, and it is far superior to any generalist LLM I’ve seen or used from Anthropic or OpenAI for financial services work. A local presence in the GCC is exactly what the market needs, and it’s great to see Model ML committing to the region as a strategic priority for growth.”