Innovation City company setup

Innovation City is Ras Al Khaimah's technology free zone. It began as Ras Al Khaimah Digital Assets Oasis — RAK DAO — a zone set up specifically for digital asset and Web3 companies, and was relaunched in 2025 under the Innovation City name with a broader technology remit.

The activity list it licenses is the point of it: artificial intelligence and robotics, Web3 and digital assets, gaming and the creator economy, health technology and education technology, cybersecurity, climate technology and transport technology. These are business models that older free zone activity lists classify awkwardly or not at all, and a zone that has defined them is worth something to a company that keeps being told its activity does not exist.

Everything else about it is a normal free zone: full foreign ownership, a trade licence, constitutional documents and an establishment card the company sponsors residence visas against.

A free zone licence is a commercial licence. It is not a regulatory permission, and in this zone that distinction matters more than in any other on this list.

If what you intend to do touches regulated territory — holding client funds, issuing or dealing in tokens, running an exchange, anything that looks like a financial service, gambling, or handling patient data — then the licence is the first of several approvals, not the last. We will tell you which regulator that puts you in front of before you incorporate, and if the answer is that this zone cannot get you there, we will say that too.

This is the zone where we are most likely to talk a client out of the thing they asked for, and it is the reason a page about it needs to be blunt rather than enthusiastic.

It fits technology companies building a product: AI and robotics businesses, Web3 and blockchain development, studios in gaming and the creator economy, health and education technology, cybersecurity, climate and transport technology. It fits founders whose activity has been refused a clean classification elsewhere.

It does not fit a trading company, and it does not fit conventional professional services — a consultancy, an agency, an import business or a general trading operation belongs in a general-purpose zone, and IFZA or Meydan will do the job at less trouble. It does not fit anyone who needs premises at scale. And it does not fit a regulated activity that has not yet spoken to its regulator.

If you are being sold this zone for a business that is not a technology business, ask why. The honest answer is usually that whoever is selling it holds one appointment.

Both are in Ras Al Khaimah and they answer different questions, which is why we hold appointments with both.

RAKEZ is the emirate's large general-purpose economic zone: trading, industry, services, premises, the full spread. Innovation City is narrow and specialist. If your business is a technology product in one of the categories above, Innovation City is built for you; for anything else in that emirate, RAKEZ is almost always the better licence.

One difference in the paperwork rather than the zone: the RAKEZ appointment is held by our sister company, Bareq Almas Businessmen Services, and it says so on its own page. The Innovation City appointment is held by Almas Financial Services directly.

Our confirmed free zone setup figure was quoted against volume licensing in the general-purpose zones, and it does not reach this one. Rather than print a number that would be wrong for every reader, this page carries no starting price at all.

What we will do is quote you in writing, once we know the activity, the visa allocation and whether a regulatory approval sits alongside the licence — which in this zone is the variable that moves the total most.