Heidi launches in UAE, targeting a $5.86bn GCC digital health market

An AI tool built to reduce the paperwork burden on doctors has officially launched in the United Arab Emirates, with Dubai set as its Middle East headquarters. Heidi, which describes itself as an AI care partner for clinicians, says it has already been used in around 80,000 consultations in the UAE over the past five months, before any formal go-live.

The company is entering a market that is growing fast. The GCC digital health AI sector is forecast to expand from $1.5 billion in 2025 to $5.86 billion by 2032, a compound annual growth rate of around 21.5%. Heidi's launch is anchored by a partnership with Nabta, the UAE's first dedicated women's health clinic, which will act as a regional centre of excellence for the platform.

The launch also comes with a notable gesture toward smaller providers: Heidi is opening free access to its platform for independent clinicians and small clinics across all sectors in the region.

How will it work?

Heidi sits inside the clinical workflow and automates the tasks that eat into consultation time. Its core product, Heidi Scribe, handles ambient documentation, listening to consultations and generating clinical notes automatically. But the platform goes beyond transcription:

• Heidi Evidence gives clinicians referenced clinical guidance at the point of care, which the company says matters most in remote or under-resourced settings where specialist support is limited.
• Heidi Remote is built to work in low-connectivity environments with high background noise.
• Heidi Comms helps care teams manage patient communications and keep follow-up on track.

The platform supports more than 120 languages and, notably, recognises dialectal Arabic from different parts of the GCC. That is a capability few clinical AI tools currently offer, and it matters in a region where patient populations speak a wide range of Arabic dialects.

Patient data is hosted in-country in the UAE to meet local data sovereignty requirements. Heidi says this is not optional for it; the company treats local data hosting as a baseline condition for operating in the region.

Nabta's clinicians have already been using the platform daily, logging 837 sessions and generating more than 1,000 notes and documents in five months. Monthly transcription volume at the clinic grew 2.6 times between January and May.

Why does it matter?

Doctor burnout is a real and documented problem in the UAE. Around one in five trainee doctors in the country show signs of burnout, with excessive administrative workload cited as one of the strongest contributing factors. Time lost to documentation is time taken away from patients, and in a region that is actively trying to expand its healthcare capacity, that is a serious drag on progress.

Heidi's pitch is straightforward: give clinicians their time back. Whether that works at scale across the GCC remains to be seen, but the early adoption numbers in the UAE suggest there is genuine appetite among doctors to use it.

The free access offer for small clinics is also worth watching. Independent practitioners and smaller facilities often carry heavy patient loads with limited administrative support. Putting AI documentation tools directly in their hands, without an enterprise sales cycle, could accelerate adoption in parts of the market that larger health tech companies typically ignore.

The context

Heidi was founded in Melbourne, Australia, and has raised $96.6 million from investors including Point72 Private Investments, Blackbird, and Headline. It currently supports more than 2.5 million consultations per week across 190 countries. The UAE launch is its first formal move into the Middle East, with broader GCC and Pan-Arab expansion planned from the Dubai base.

The UAE has made AI a national priority, with a stated goal of becoming a global AI leader by 2031. That policy backdrop has made the country attractive for international AI companies looking for a regional foothold, and healthcare is one of the sectors where that government push is most visible.

Clinical AI scribes have become a crowded category globally, with companies like Nabla, Suki, and Nuance (now part of Microsoft) all competing for hospital and clinic contracts. What sets some apart is localisation: language support, regulatory compliance, and data hosting. Heidi's bet in the GCC is that dialectal Arabic recognition and in-country data hosting will give it an edge over tools built primarily for English-speaking markets.

More information is available at heidihealth.com/gcc.