Inside a UAE Founder’s First Enterprise Sale

In May 2025, Dubai-based construction software startup Zaper AI announced that it had signed its first enterprise agreement with Al Adrak Construction. The buyer had a specific concern about adding software. Each new tool could make it harder for site workers to report what was happening and for managers to use those reports. In a transcript published by Zaper, Al Adrak’s representative, identified as Das, pointed to voice, photos and natural language as ways the product could fit work already happening on site. The agreement gave founder Hashim Basheer and his team a chance to put that proposition to work in the UAE. Zaper AI’s May 2025 announcement and transcript

Zaper called it an enterprise agreement and described it as the company’s first. That is the milestone this profile follows. The public record identifies the parties and the proposed work, but gives no contract value, payment schedule or procurement chronology. It also leaves open whether an earlier pilot involved this buyer. The evidence comes from published accounts, including a founder Q&A, the company’s announcement, contemporary coverage and the contractor’s own UAE materials.

What Basheer’s team did before announcing the deal

In a published Q&A with OCTA, Basheer described roughly a year of work before Zaper went public. He said the team developed the product with early pilot partners and used that work to understand operational problems. He described Pratheep as a co-founder with business and growth experience, Sajith as leading AI agent design and Sudheesh as chief technology officer. The account explains how Basheer describes the team’s early work. It does not date individual pilots, name their participants or tie a specific pilot result to Al Adrak’s decision. Basheer’s published Q&A with OCTA

There is a useful distinction between learning with pilot partners and proving that an enterprise buyer is prepared to sign. Early collaborators can help a founder find the work that needs improvement. A purchaser has to decide whether the product belongs in its own operation. Even if both groups face the same broad problem, their staff, site conditions and internal processes can differ. The public sequence shows Zaper working with early partners and then announcing an enterprise agreement. It leaves the steps connecting those milestones undocumented.

The scope was construction operations. Zaper described a way for field staff to capture information using familiar inputs and for that information to reach people making decisions. Basheer’s public explanation focused on the work between the site and the management team. The technical proposition was useful to the extent that it helped people report and retrieve information without a difficult new routine. That focus also gave Al Adrak a concrete question to consider. Would the product fit the way its teams already worked?

The adoption question Al Adrak raised

In the announcement transcript, Das described adoption, integration and coordination as challenges when new tools are introduced. He said Zaper’s approach to frontline users was part of what interested the contractor. A worker could use voice, a photo or natural language to interact with the system. Basheer described the same design from the supplier side, emphasising simpler reporting and retrieval. Both accounts point to the work of entering and using information as a reason for the partnership. They are published statements about intent and fit at the announcement stage. Zaper AI’s published discussion with Al Adrak

That concern is concrete for a founder building site software. Consider a supervisor who notices that work cannot proceed because a material has yet to arrive. A photo or voice note might make the issue easier to record. Someone still needs to identify the project, understand the blocker and decide what to do. If the note lands in a separate inbox with no owner, easier entry may add another place to check. This is an illustration of the adoption problem, drawn from the public description of the product. The sources do not document an incident of this kind on an Al Adrak site.

The gap between input and action gives a buyer something specific to evaluate. Can staff enter the information at the point of work? Can another person find it without asking the original reporter? Can a manager distinguish an unresolved issue from one that was handled? A demonstration could answer some of those questions. Sustained use during real work would provide stronger evidence about the effort involved and which routines actually changed. The public record gives no adoption measures from the agreement.

Al Adrak’s own site lists Dubai developments, including Ellington House 3 and 4. That independently establishes a UAE operating context for the buyer. It gives no reason to identify those developments as sites for Zaper’s product. In parallel, contemporary coverage by Madhyamam described the enterprise agreement and the proposed phased UAE rollout, identifying Basheer as Zaper’s founder and CEO at the announcement. Its account closely tracks the announcement, so it corroborates the public record without independently auditing the contract or implementation. Al Adrak’s project portfolio Madhyamam’s contemporary coverage

Why the rollout was described in phases

Contemporary coverage described a rollout that would begin with field implementation and move towards providing insight to management. That order matters. A manager can only act on field reports if people submit them, the reports can be interpreted and someone deals with errors. A staged rollout gives the parties a chance to examine those steps before relying on the resulting information at another level of the business. The sources establish the proposed sequence. They do not show which sites began using the product, when each phase started or whether it reached wider deployment. Madhyamam’s rollout account

An Umm Al Quwain Free Trade Zone Instagram carousel shows a separate UAE construction milestone. It gives local visual context for the kind of setting where progress can be visible from the outside while the record of day-to-day decisions remains internal. The project in that carousel is separate from Al Adrak and Zaper. It offers no evidence that either company worked on it or that any software was used.

The commercial consequence of a phased rollout is that the first work and the later opportunity can be different in size and cost. A startup evaluating a similar project would want to know which users need training, who supplies access, how long the first stage runs and who can approve the next one. For the buyer, a useful check would be whether staff can keep using the workflow after the initial support is reduced. For the supplier, it would be whether another site can be added at a cost the commercial terms support. Those are questions raised by the rollout design, rather than claims about what the parties agreed.

A later Google Play listing for Zaper HQ, updated in May 2026, describes an app for construction field workers that records attendance. The listing connects to Zaper’s website and identifies a UAE-based developer. It shows how a publicly described field workflow can be quite specific. Its description does not identify Al Adrak or say that the app was part of the 2025 agreement. The product listing and the rollout announcement answer different questions. The listing describes what a developer offers, while the announcement describes work the parties intended to pursue together. Zaper HQ developer listing

What the signing settles in the public record

The announcement makes the buyer, supplier, UAE scope and first enterprise milestone identifiable. The buyer-side comments explain why frontline use mattered. Basheer’s separate account explains that the company had worked with pilot partners before making the enterprise announcement. Neither source describes the first introduction, competing offers, the people with final purchasing authority or the terms that brought the agreement to signature.

The evidence is strongest on the first two visible milestones. Zaper announced a named agreement, and it published the parties’ account of why the product fit the buyer’s needs. The buyer’s own site establishes that it has UAE operations. A purchase order, signed contract, payment record or results report would answer different questions. Those records were not available for this account. A reader evaluating the company should keep the signing and later performance separate.

What another UAE founder can take from the deal

Start with the part of the buyer’s work that an employee can show you. In this case, the public discussion turned on how people at a site could record an issue and make it useful to someone else. If you sell a similar product, ask the people doing the work to show what they use today and what happens when a report is incomplete. A presentation to management can establish interest. Watching a supervisor try the workflow can establish where it needs to change.

Give the person evaluating the purchase and the person doing the work their own evidence. A site supervisor may care about completing a report without retraining the whole team. A manager may need to see whether the report is complete enough to support a decision. Procurement may need a defined scope and responsibilities. One demonstration can serve several purposes when the founder knows which question each person is there to answer. In the Zaper record, the buyer’s attention to frontline interaction is the best-supported explanation for why the offer was attractive. The sources leave the procurement route private.

Preserve what a first agreement can teach the next team. Ask which inputs users already know how to provide, which parts of setup are specific to the buyer and which work can carry to another site. Record what has to be tested before extending the service. A first customer can ask for useful changes that others will also want. It can also ask for work that makes sense only in its own environment. The founder should be able to tell those apart before turning the first contract into a standard offer.

Zaper and Al Adrak’s public accounts show a specific adoption concern and the design proposed to address it. The reported agreement gave the teams a way to start with field work before moving toward management use. For a founder preparing a first enterprise sale, the useful question is similarly specific. What can a buyer’s employees do with the product during an ordinary shift, and what evidence will the people paying for it see afterwards?