More British companies are choosing to run their businesses in Dubai. By 2026, Dubai will host more than 1.4 million active companies, with around 250,000 new firms formed each year, and UK-founded teams are increasingly among them. That growth is expected to continue through 2030, particularly as running a company in the UK becomes more burdensome.
For many founders, it comes down to the tax and compliance overhead of running a company. In the UK, corporate tax now reaches 25% for larger profits, while personal and dividend taxes can climb into the upper 40s. VAT sits at 20%, employer costs continue to rise, and regulatory requirements have become more layered over time, from payroll and reporting obligations to ongoing compliance and filings. None of that stops companies from operating, but it changes the conversation around whether the UK is still the best place to grow, and why more founders are looking to move to Dubai.
As skrooge.ai co-founder Anatolii Solomanin puts it, “People sometimes hear ‘Dubai’ or ‘UAE’ and assume it means tax-free. In reality, there are clear tax and reporting requirements, but they’re designed so that moving here and starting a business is quick and running it is simple.”
Those requirements sit within a largely digital system, so registrations, filings, and updates happen online and don’t drag on for weeks. Also, there’s no personal income tax, capital gains tax, or inheritance tax. Corporate tax applies at 9% above a defined threshold, while VAT is 5%.
As Solomanin explains, “With neobanks like Wio, and now Revolut entering the market, opening accounts, issuing cards, and moving money is no longer the hard part. That gets solved very quickly. What doesn’t go away is the accounting and tax work that follows, and that’s the part we’re built to handle.”
Much of accounting still comes down to repetitive work: collecting invoices, checking whether documents meet tax requirements, categorising transactions, and matching invoices to bank statements. As volumes increase, that work becomes harder to manage and easier to get wrong.
By building proprietary software and AI agents that handle the heavy lifting described above, skrooge.ai frees its accounting team to focus on client-facing tasks. As a result, the service is typically around two times more affordable than traditional outsourced accounting providers and up to five times cheaper than hiring a full-time accountant, while maintaining accurate, on-time reporting.
Additionally, the client platform focuses on saving time and reducing stress for business owners when handling accounting. Invoices, receipts, and statements can be easily uploaded to the app or messengers or automatically captured from emails, saving time on invoice hunting.
Skrooge App also helps clients track project deadlines and statuses, and identify blockers when something is due from the client. This matters in the accounting and tax context, where multiple recurring processes run in parallel at different cadences (monthly bookkeeping, quarterly VAT filings, annual corporate tax submissions, audit and financial statement filings, and license renewals).
As mentioned already, it’s not that humans are not involved – on the contrary. After AI does the work, it is reviewed by two additional layers of finance professionals: an accountant and a tax manager, ensuring that financial reports are accurate and tax compliant, instead of the usual setup where one overworked person does everything and checks their own work, which is still common in the market.
The team comprises qualified finance professionals with both international and local credentials, including ACCA, CPA, and other chartered qualifications. Their backgrounds span Big 4, PE/VC and tech-enabled accounting, giving them a practical understanding of how founders and investors expect financial reporting to look.
This setup frees up more human time for client-facing work – something traditional accounting firms often miss through weak project management and poor communication.
AI also solves a long-standing inconsistency problem in accounting. With outsourced or in-house accountants, people come and go, often taking all the knowledge of how a client’s books were handled with them. With skrooge.ai, that knowledge stays within the platform, since AI remembers the custom chart of accounts and all transaction allocations from the very beginning.
On the tax side, the team has handled thousands of VAT and Corporate Tax registrations and filings, supported more than 100 audits and reviews, and worked with complex setups, including multi-entity groups, qualifying free zone persons (QFZP) and transfer pricing cases.
The service is structured around a monthly Accounting & Tax package that includes all essential services, which are often separated and priced separately by other providers, leading to unpleasant surprise overpayments.
Additional services, such as backlog accounting, audits, tax advisory, or payroll-related filings, are available as part of skrooge.ai’s one-time services offering.
For founders, this removes much of the uncertainty that often surrounds accounting costs and replaces it with a more predictable setup.
As more foreign firms relocate to Dubai, the basic infrastructure for running a business is falling into place. Opening bank accounts and receiving online payments are no longer bottlenecks.
What matters next is whether the rest of the operation can keep up. skrooge.ai takes on the ongoing accounting and tax work, pairing automation with human oversight to support businesses at the point of relocation and as they scale.
Looking ahead, skrooge.ai plans to introduce AI-powered tools for on-demand financial analysis, including historical trends and peer benchmarking as well as budgeting and forecasting capabilities. The financial analysis and advice will focus primarily on cost optimization through data-driven insights.
Another key challenge is providing financial education to business owners who may not be well-versed in this area, and connecting them with peers who can offer practical advice based on firsthand experience solving similar problems.