Meet Bahrain’s PROCODE, an AI-native e-sports platform

**Bahrain’s PROCODE is an AI-native e-sports platform built to become the operating system for competitive gaming. **

When Shahd AlZaki and co-founder Rami Jamal began exploring the competitive gaming sector, they found an industry growing quickly but still relying on disconnected tools and manual processes.

Tournament organisers were managing competitions through spreadsheets and multiple platforms. Coaches were handling bookings and player development separately, while payments and players’ competitive histories were often spread across different systems.

This fragmentation inspired them to establish PROCODE in 2024. The Bahrain-based startup is developing an AI-native operating system through which organisations can manage esports competitions, training, payments and other operational functions.

“Competitive gaming has grown enormously, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, but much of the industry still operates through fragmented and manual systems. Tournament organisers use multiple tools and spreadsheets, communities operate through platforms like Discord, coaches manage sessions separately, payments happen outside the ecosystem, and a player’s competitive and development history can be scattered across different platforms,” founder and CEO Shahd AlZaki told Disrupt Africa.

“Ultimately, our vision is to connect the entire esports journey in one place.”

PROCODE’s platform is organised around four areas: Compete, Train, Pay and Deploy.

“Organisers can run tournaments, leagues and multi-season circuits; players can access verified coaches and AI-powered VOD analysis; payments and prize distributions can be managed through the platform; and organisations can deploy PROCODE through white-label solutions, APIs, SSO and analytics. Underneath these layers, we’re building AI agents to automate much of the manual administration involved,” explained AlZaki.

According to the startup’s research, 49% of tournaments globally are managed manually, while coaches can spend about a quarter of their time on administrative work. PROCODE estimates that MENA accounts for more than US$ 100 million in competitive players within a global market of approximately US$ 540 million.

While global platforms solve individual parts of this journey, PROCODE has seen an opportunity to connect these fragmented functions into one AI-native esports operating system, built with MENA in mind from day one.

“That includes being Arabic-native rather than simply translating an English platform, as well as developing payment infrastructure and experiences suited to the region,” AlZaki said. “So in many ways, our biggest competition isn’t one specific company — it’s the fragmented and manual way the industry still operates today.”

Uptake has been encouraging, particularly as PROCODE is seeing engagement from different sides of the e-sports ecosystem, rather than from players alone.

“We’ve attracted till today a total of 4,000 users, seven coaches, and managed 10 tournaments.

We have a total of three brand ambassadors, and our ambassador network currently includes three creators across MENA with a combined following of more than 550,000, helping us build communities around competitive gaming and bring their audiences into the PROCODE ecosystem,” said AlZaki.

By bringing tournaments, coaching and payments into one platform, PROCODE is helping make competitive gaming easier to access and manage across the MENA region. Players can find coaching and track their development, while organisers can run competitions without relying on disconnected tools and manual processes.

Support from Women in Tech

PROCODE has raised a pre-seed round of funding, as well as grant capital from the Standard Chartered Foundation’s Women in Tech Accelerator. The programme, implemented locally by Innovate for Bahrain with support from Village Capital, is part of a multi-region initiative that supports impact-creating, tech-enabled, women-led startups in building thriving businesses across Africa, the Middle East, and Pakistan.

“The grant prize supported us in further platform development and hiring to grow our team. We would recommend the programme as the one-on-one mentoring was very beneficial, being part of a community that can support you is very important, and the prize money can support a startup that has just started on its journey,” said AlZaki.

Building in MENA, with global ambitions

Headquartered in Bahrain, PROCODE is nonetheless built for the wider MENA market.

“Our immediate focus is establishing a strong presence across the GCC and wider MENA, where e-sports is growing rapidly but much of the supporting infrastructure remains fragmented,” AlZaki said.

“The product reflects that regional strategy. For example, PROCODE is being built as a genuinely Arabic-native product with full right-to-left functionality rather than Arabic being added as a translation layer. We’re also developing payment infrastructure designed around MENA-native payment rails.”

PROCODE, which has both B2B and B2C business models, is not limiting its ambition to MENA.

“The problems we’re solving — tournament administration, fragmented player data, coaching operations and payments — exist globally. Our approach is therefore simple: prove it in MENA, build it for the world,” she said.

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