I started self-learning data science and engineering in Jordan back in 2012. Hadoop was just being open-sourced and companies worldwide were emerging everyday! In Jordan, the ecosystem was too small and booting up slowly. Now in 2017, however, it is growing steadily with great potential regionally and maybe even globally! I hope this post highlights this fact.
So, without further ado, this is a list of awesome companies driving data innovation in Jordan (ordered alphabetically)…
By the way, if you want to list your company, send me on twitter or linkedin!
ArabiaWeather
Weather Technologies for the Arab Region
ArabiaWeather is specialized in weather forecasting both for businesses and end-users. It relies on gathering raw data from multiple sources (including Universal ground & atmospheric observations, Universal numerical weather models, Real-time satellite data, and ArabiaWeather’s automatic weather stations), then process it to generate accurate and localized weather forecast data. Although the Weather Technologies team do not refer to themselves as Big Data team, they are specialized in processing high-volume, high-frequency weather data with impressive performance. D language is a major player in their stack because their fanatic about losing a bit of memory or a cycle of cpu! They also have some cool open source projects on their GitHub page.
Arabot
Arabic Bot Platform for the Arab Region
Arabot is a conversational AI/Bot Platform. It’s building cloud services for Intelligent Arabic Bots used to enhance customer experience, automate tasks and reduce cost. The company is doing a lot of work on Arabic Natural Language Processing and Understanding. They’re also working with Machine Learning, Knowledge Graphs, Kafka, ELK-stack and Apache Solr.
Blue Kangaroo
Online shopping assistance for the US market
Blue Kangaroo is a shopping assistant that helps users find personalized products and deals across various shopping websites. The company is currently shifting towards building chatbots for retailers as a service. Although it targets the US market, the engineering team is fully based in Amman, Jordan. Technically, the company creates recommender systems to personalize experiences for millions of users exposed to hundreds of millions of products. All in real time! Blue Kangaroo’s strong team is working with an impressive and diverse tech stack. To my knowledge, Blue Kangaroo was the first company to start a dedicated data science and engineering team in Jordan back in 2014.
CashBasha
E-commerce for the Arab Region
CashBasha caters to online shoppers with no access to credit cards by providing amazon’s inventory with cash on delivery payment method. The company uses a fixed price model (including shipping, taxes and costumes). It uses machine learning to provide more accurate estimates and mitigate financial/sales risks associated with over/underpricing.
Cognitro Analytics
Big Data services, consultancy and training
Cognitro Analytics operates between Jordan, Dubai and the US. It creates predictive models for government and large enterprises and help build the big data culture by offering consultancy and training and multiple organizational levels.
Delphi Data Analytics
Data Science services and consultancy
Delphi Data Analytics helps companies from all sizes leverage data to make better decisions with insights, visualizations and trainings. It also offers solutions for cutting-edge machine learning problems using deep-learning.
Intrasoft
Big Data services
Intrasoft does data science and big data services. They’ve been building internal capacity around big data for a while now and they’re accepting clients from the region now.
Ligadata
Big data products and services for the Global Market
Ligadata created an open-source real-time decisioning engine called Kamanja, Kamanja is used in Flare; a real time data analytical platform that consumes data from several streams to get real-time aggregates for business decisions. Ligadata leverages big data for data governance, data processing and real-time ingestion, data preparation, ETL and enrichment process. One of the use-cases in the telecom industry is to connect to Telcom data feeds (batch or realtime) and aggregate KPIs in real time on executive dashboard.
Liwwa
Inclusive Financial Services for the Arab Region
Liwwa is technology-driven FinTech working on financial technology and inclusive financial services (e.g. crowd-lending platform)
Liwwa uses data science to improve customer service standards by prioritizing tickets that are likely to convert and to improve credit assessment standards. It also uses machine learning to build optical character recognition (OCR) models for papers bank statements.
Mawdoo3
Arabic content for the Arab region
Mawdoo3 is the most popular Arabic language site in the region. It hosts a myriad of articles on topics complementing the Arabic wikipedia content.
In early 2017, Mawdoo3 started an artificial intelligence department to be an industrial research lab to create Arabic language technologies that can be used in mawdoo3 and productized for others companies and organizations to use.
MyRelated
Recommendation Engine as a service for the Arab region.
MyRelated is an upcoming content discovery, intelligence and recommendation platform for Arabic content. Their stack includes scala, php and go language.
P.S. they’re hiring heavily!
OpenSooq
Classifieds website for the Arab region
OpenSooq runs a consumer-to-consumer classifieds website. The nature of the data made the company develop and improve Arabic search engine and language processing tools especially for different local dialects.
Right now, the company is moving more into big data processing both on premise and using cloud services. Also, they’re open-sourcing some tools on GitHub and sharing knowledge on their engineering blog!
Samsung
Regional R&D Office
Samsung has a Research & Development office in Jordan working on some secret sauces for the mother company. Given the skills they’re attracting, I believe it’s related to Arabic lingual and regional localization. Deep learning appears to be involved within their efforts, the rest is secret.
Semantic Intelligent Technologies
Solutions and Big data services for the Arab region
SIT has great track record in enterprise software development, recently, they’ve ventured to offer data science and big data services for the region. It’s still early to judge, but given the team, I have high expectations of the quality.
SOUQ.com
Online marketplace
SOUQ.com (a subsidiary of amazon.com) is the largest online marketplace in the Arab region. They’re using big data on all fronts including big data management and data warehousing, business intelligence, search and recommender engines and automating and optimizing back-office operations.
XCalculus
Big data products for government and large enterprises
XCalculus is building big data products for government and large enterprises in the domain of national security, cybersecurity, fraud and financial crimes. While actual development is done elsewhere, Jordan office is mainly concerned with delivery and deployment operations.
If you’re company is missing, feel free to message me on twitter or linkedin