The speaker economy platform reached 120,000 users across 28 countries in sixteen months. Its founders believe AI agents, not headcount, are how startups will scale from the UAE.
DUBAI, UAE, 3 September 2026. SpeakUp, the AI matching app for the speaker economy built at Dubai’s in5 Tech, has been shortlisted twice at the Gulf Business Awards 2026: for AI Company of the Year, where it stands alongside ADNOC, Space42, Globant and AIQ, and for AI Leader of the Year, a personal nomination for its co-founder and chief executive Nick Zhuchkov.
The winners will be announced on 23 September at The Ritz-Carlton JBR in Dubai.
The recognition comes just sixteen months after launch. SpeakUp went live in April 2025 and today serves more than 120,000 users across 28 countries, with a catalogue of over 70,000 speakers, podcast guests and expert sources working in nine languages.
The app lets event organizers, podcasters, journalists and corporate learning teams find and book verified experts directly, replacing the traditional bureau model and its 20 to 30 percent commissions with a flat subscription. The booking itself, from confirmation request, happens inside the app.
How SpeakUp Runs With 31 AI Agents
What sets the company apart, and what caught the attention of the awards jury, is how it is run. SpeakUp employs three people. The rest of the organization consists of 31 AI agents that hold real operational roles across support, matching, quality control and marketing, making it one of the few AI-native company structures anywhere that is running in production rather than in a pitch deck.
“Everyone talks about what AI agents will do to companies someday. We just built the company that way and found out,” says Zhuchkov, a Forbes 30 Under 30 alumnus who wrote the platform’s entire codebase himself, across web, iOS and Android.
“Some of it works better than a human department ever did. Some of it fails in ways nobody warns you about. Both halves of that answer are why we exist.”
The Market Gap SpeakUp Is Solving
The problem SpeakUp is chasing is bigger than its own niche. By the company’s research, drawn from more than 7,000 real booking requests, an estimated 19.7 million people worldwide hold expertise that someone would pay to put on a stage or on air, yet around 92 percent of them have no structured public profile at all.
The practical result is familiar to anyone who attends conferences: the same fifty names appear everywhere, while organizers insist they cannot find fresh voices. On SpeakUp, 80 percent of requests receive matched responses within 24 hours, against the one to four weeks a typical agency search takes.
The Gulf Business shortlist caps an unusual first chapter. In late 2025, SpeakUp won The Final Pitch: Dubai on OSN, becoming the only startup of the season to receive an investment live on air, in an episode filmed at Expo City Dubai.
The company has since been named the UAE’s national nominee for the World Summit Awards by TDRA, the country’s digital government regulator, reached the finals of the Startup World Cup in Japan, Macao, Dubai and Ecuador, and became one of the first platforms bookable from inside AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Claude through the open MCP standard.
“We chose Dubai over the US and Europe on purpose, and this shortlist is part of why,” says Helen Kareva, co-founder and chief product officer, who spent a decade building learning systems for corporations of up to 330,000 employees before starting SpeakUp.
“In what other market does a sixteen-month-old company with three people on payroll get judged on the same list as ADNOC? The UAE takes builders seriously, and it moves at our speed.”
Whatever happens on 23 September, the company says its plan does not change: keep growing the expert base, deepen the AI-assistant integrations, and keep publishing honestly about what an agent-run company can and cannot do.
About SpeakUp
SpeakUp is the AI matching app for the speaker economy: finding and booking speakers, podcast guests and expert sources without bureaus, agents or commissions.
Founded in 2025 and headquartered at in5 Tech, Dubai (Shelp FZ-LLC), with a US entity in Delaware (SpeakUp Global Inc.), the platform serves 120,000+ users in 28 countries, offers native iOS and Android apps, and works inside AI assistants via the MCP standard. The company has been featured in more than 70 media outlets.
Media contact
- Email: pr@speak-up.pro
- Website: www.speak-up.proÂ