Priya M. Nair: From corporate leadership to deep-tech entrepreneurship

What inspired your transition from corporate leadership to deep-tech entrepreneurship, and what challenges have shaped your journey as a female AI founder?

My entrepreneurial journey evolved from years of corporate leadership, beginning with the UAE Air Force & Air Defence and followed by 11 years in strategy and growth within an American engineering and programme management company.

I had a health scare in 2019. A mini-stroke which put me at high-risk. And then in 2020 -2021 when Covid hit, like everyone I started looking inward - What do I want to do with my life, while millions lost their lives, I have been granted the opportunity to live, so what next. What do I want to be my legacy, how do I want to be remembered. I wanted to make an impact and felt that calling in Entrepreneurship - the right vehicle to channel my skills - leadership, strategy, communications, creativity.

The challenges have centred almost entirely on fundraising. Much of the work has been in convincing the market and investors that a non-technical founder leading a deep-tech company is not a liability - and that neither is being a woman. We recently closed our pre-seed round, and what made the difference was referral and networking, trust built steadily over years.

How is ZWAG AI’s Mātṛ model addressing linguistic bias in artificial intelligence, and why is preserving language diversity critical to digital inclusion?

Most large AI models are trained predominantly on English and a handful of widely represented languages. Consequently, they often struggle with complex grammar, cultural context and linguistic nuance.

My co-founder Nipuna Abeykoon and I developed Mātṛ to address this structural bias. Rather than forcing languages into standardised patterns, Mātṛ mathematically identifies where languages diverge and corrects AI interpretations at inference time, without requiring existing models to be retrained.

Two examples show what that means in practice. In languages like Japanese, standard models push indirect, respectful honorifics through English-centric logic, so a polite request comes out jarringly blunt; Mātṛ calculates the divergence and restores the tone, intent and cultural context the speaker actually meant. In legal discovery the stakes are higher still. In languages with complex case marking, such as Turkish or Malayalam, conventional models flatten passive and conditional statements into direct assertions - a witness’s cautious “It could have been known” becomes a definitive “They knew”. Mātṛ preserves that evidentiary nuance.

Our Linguistics Intelligence Platform covers 2,331 languages, with plans to extend beyond 5,000.

Language represents identity, knowledge and access. As healthcare, education and public services increasingly adopt AI, linguistic accuracy becomes essential to ensuring that communities are not excluded from the digital future.

The UAE is among the most linguistically diverse societies in the world. What role could it play in building responsible, inclusive AI, and what would a Centre of Excellence for linguistic sovereignty based here look like?

Few places bring together as many languages and cultures in a single society as the UAE does. That diversity is an asset the rest of the world cannot easily replicate.

What I would like to see established here is a Centre of Excellence for linguistic sovereignty, a place where native speakers and native translators from many languages work together on the data and the judgements that AI systems depend upon. Linguistic accuracy cannot be built from English-language assumptions alone. It requires the people who hold the language.

Such a centre would not serve this region alone. It would contribute to democratising AI for the rest of the world, and that work would carry the UAE’s name. In the Middle East, I cannot think of anywhere else it could realistically be built.

My corporate experience, entrepreneurial journey and mentorship work have reinforced the importance of strategic clarity, disciplined execution and continuous learning.

In my book, Formula-G: Scale Your Startup to a Growth Machine, I explore the principles of scaling businesses. Mentoring founders through Startup with Priya has further strengthened my belief that sustainable growth requires more than an innovative idea.

My advice to aspiring women entrepreneurs is to develop deep expertise, question established assumptions and think globally from the outset. I would add that as female founders we need to arrive with far greater reserves of preparation, optimism, patience and resilience than our counterparts. In five years of entrepreneurship I failed three times before Mātṛ. That is what it took to raise our round and set a pathway to success.

Build strong teams, pursue meaningful partnerships and remain connected to the problems you are solving. Commercial ambition and social responsibility can coexist, creating businesses that are both competitive and consequential.