In August 2021, Alexander Epure, Mehrad Yaghmai, and Usama Nini started Qureos in Dubai. The first product was not a hiring engine. It was a learn-to-earn mentorship marketplace, cohort-based learning that paired trainees with working professionals, and by the spring of 2022 it counted some 25,000 trainees and 200 mentors.
That marketplace is what raised the company's $3 million pre-seed in April 2022, led by COTU Ventures and Colle Capital. The pivot came after. The founders had been watching companies spend months on a problem that should take days. A recruiter posting a role, manually sorting CVs, scheduling calls, dropping candidates, then starting over. The feedback loops were broken. The tools were fragmented. Their conclusion was that AI could run the mechanical parts of hiring so well that human judgment could be reserved for the moments that actually matter.
The platform's AI assistant, Iris, launched around 2023. By the company's account, it screens candidates in under 15 seconds per profile, sourcing, matching, and conducting structured assessments without a recruiter having to touch the keyboard. The result, Qureos says, is hiring timelines compressed from months to as little as six days, and roughly 2,160 hours of recruiter time saved per organization each year.
The businesses that tried Qureos kept expanding their use of it. More roles, more teams, more markets. Qatar Airways, Dubai Economy and Tourism, BAAN Holdings, Union Properties. By 2026, over 1,000 enterprise and public sector organizations had adopted the platform.
In February 2026, Prosus Ventures and Salica Oryx Fund led a $5 million seed round into Qureos, with backing from Oraseya Capital, Plus VC, F6 Ventures, BDev Ventures, Sunny Side Venture Partners, and Daniel Tyre, an early HubSpot executive who knows something about building software that enterprises actually use. The capital goes toward expanding AI capabilities, scaling the go-to-market team, and deepening the platform's footprint across MENA and beyond.
There is a version of this story that sounds like every other AI recruiting company. Epure's version is different because of the specificity of the numbers the company puts on itself. Six days. Fifteen seconds. 2,160 hours. The figures are Qureos's own, but they are the kind a client can hold against a calendar. He did not build a tool that promises hiring will feel faster. He built one that invites the measurement.
In a region where talent is the limiting factor for nearly every growing business, the founder who controls the hiring stack controls something important.