Fadi Maayta Turns Decades of Leadership Into an AI Future
For many entrepreneurs, success creates a reason to stay with what they already know. For Fadi Maayta, it became a reason to ask a harder question. What should come next?
After more than two decades of building businesses, leading teams and working across major international companies, Maayta reached a point where he could have remained in familiar territory. Instead, he chose reinvention. Following his entrepreneurial exit from ANDS, he stepped away from the industry that had defined much of his career and began building around artificial intelligence, wellbeing, human performance and sport.
Today, the Dubai based entrepreneur is Founder and Executive Chairman of ACT Holding, Founder and CEO of LUUCI, and involved in the regional growth of One Hundred Group. His current chapter is not simply about launching another company. It is about using years of leadership experience to enter sectors that are still being shaped.
Fadi Maayta Learned Leadership Inside Global Businesses
Long before AI became the centre of his work, Maayta spent years learning how large organisations operate. His career included nearly thirteen years with Philip Morris International, where he held leadership positions across the Middle East and beyond. His responsibilities covered markets including Jordan, Oman and Saudi Arabia, while another part of his journey took him into global sales strategy.
He later moved into a senior regional role at JUUL Labs, leading business across the Middle East, Africa and Turkey. These experiences exposed him to different markets, cultures, regulations and customer behaviours.
That corporate period built skills that later became important in entrepreneurship. Growing a business requires more than an idea. It requires people, discipline, timing and the ability to make decisions when the outcome is uncertain.
Leaving Corporate Comfort For Entrepreneurship
In 2020, Maayta co-founded ANDS and went on to lead the company as CEO, moving deeper into entrepreneurship. Building a company from the ground up was different from leading within an established global organisation. The business had to create its own systems, team, market position and momentum.
Under his leadership, ANDS expanded across the region, giving Maayta a new perspective on what it means to build rather than simply manage. The experience brought growth, but it also came with the pressure and uncertainty that follow founders when their decisions directly shape a company.
Years later, he successfully exited ANDS and handed the business to new ownership and leadership. That moment could easily have become a comfortable finish line.
Instead, it became another starting point.
Maayta has spoken publicly about choosing to close that chapter and move toward sectors he considered more future-focused and human-centered. The decision reveals an important part of his entrepreneurial mindset. He appears less interested in repeating a familiar formula than in learning something new.
As he puts it:
“For two decades, I built businesses in an industry whose best years are behind it. Today, I am focused on industries whose best years are still ahead.”
ACT Holding Marks A Completely New Chapter
That decision led to ACT Holding, a founder-led investment and operating group focused on building and scaling businesses around artificial intelligence, health, wellbeing, human performance and the sports economy.
Rather than treating AI as a fashionable label, Maayta is positioning the company around practical applications. ACT Holding works as both a builder and operator, supporting ventures while exploring partnerships and new opportunities across the region.
One important part of this strategy is ACT AI Lab, which focuses on helping build and scale AI-native companies while developing AI agents and intelligent workforces for businesses.
The approach reflects a broader shift in how companies are beginning to think about artificial intelligence. Rather than viewing AI simply as a software feature, businesses are increasingly exploring how intelligent systems and AI agents can become part of everyday operations, decision-making and workforce capabilities.
For Maayta, this stage also means accepting that experience does not remove the need to keep learning. He has described the move into AI as a return to being a beginner, surrounded by technologists and specialists who challenge his thinking.
LUUCI Brings AI Into Everyday Wellbeing
LUUCI is one of the clearest examples of Maayta’s new direction. As Founder and CEO, he is developing the platform around AI-powered family wellbeing, with pets serving as its first focus.
The idea sits at the meeting point of technology and everyday life. Instead of presenting artificial intelligence as something distant, LUUCI aims to connect it with personal wellbeing and the daily decisions people make around those they care for.
The company is preparing for the United States as an important launch market and has been working on intellectual property as the platform develops.
For Maayta, LUUCI represents more than a new business category. It shows how dramatically his professional focus has changed and how he is applying commercial experience to a completely different kind of problem.
Sport Is Becoming Another Part Of His Vision
Maayta’s interest in the future also extends into sport. Through his work with One Hundred Group, he is helping support the expansion of a global trail-running and endurance-sport organization across the Middle East and North Africa.
One Hundred has established its global operational headquarters in Dubai and is looking toward growth across markets including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Jordan and Egypt.
For Maayta, the opportunity is bigger than organising races. He has spoken about a future where athlete data, wearables, safety, performance, fan engagement, sponsorship and smart venues become connected through technology.
His recent presence at LEAP 2026 in Riyadh reflected that direction. His attention there was focused on how AI and digital infrastructure are changing industries, including sport, health and enterprise.
Starting Again May Be His Biggest Achievement
The most inspiring part of Fadi Maayta’s journey is not one job title or company. It is his willingness to begin again after already achieving professional success.
Experience can create confidence, but it can also create comfort. Maayta has chosen to use his past as a foundation rather than a boundary. The leadership lessons from multinational companies, the pressure of building ANDS as its co-founder and CEO, and the perspective gained from a successful entrepreneurial exit are now being carried into a new generation of businesses.
His story offers a useful message for anyone who believes they must remain attached to the career that made them successful. Reinvention does not require forgetting the past. It can mean taking everything learned before and applying it to a new challenge.
Today, Fadi Maayta is building in AI, wellbeing and sport from Dubai, but his larger journey is about something more human. It is about curiosity after success, ambition after an exit and the courage to become a student again.
For him, the next chapter is still being written. And that may be exactly what makes it worth watching.
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