companies

Technology Innovation Institute

Abu Dhabi government research institute behind the open-weight Falcon language models, from Falcon 40B to the hybrid Falcon-H1 architecture.

Technology Innovation Institute (TII) is the applied-research arm of Abu Dhabi's Advanced Technology Research Council, established in 2020 as a government-funded institute spanning nine centers covering artificial intelligence, robotics, cryptography, quantum computing, and more. Its AI and Digital Science unit built the Falcon family of large language models, first released as Falcon-40B in 2023 under a permissive license that let it briefly top the Hugging Face Open LLM Leaderboard. Since then TII has shipped a fast cadence of follow-ups: Falcon 180B pushed toward GPT-3.5-class performance, Falcon Mamba became one of the first open state-space models to compete with transformer architectures, and the Falcon 3 and Falcon-H1 lines pair hybrid transformer-Mamba blocks with dedicated Arabic-language variants aimed at edge and on-device deployment. TII reports well over 12 million cumulative downloads across the Falcon lineup. Unlike most foundation-model labs, TII isn't venture-funded — it operates on UAE government backing as part of the Advanced Technology Research Council's broader research mandate, and has partnered with Nvidia, AWS, and Hugging Face to distribute Falcon models globally. Dr. Najwa Aaraj has served as CEO since 2024, succeeding Dr. Ray O. Johnson.

Founded

2020

Headquarters

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Sector

lab