Qatar unveils $2 billion push for startups as Web Summit opens
Qatar committed $2 billion to support startups as its banner tech gathering opened to sold-out crowds, drawing more than 30,000 people.
The Qatar Investment Authority is planning to invest in five new venture capital funds, expanding an earlier created Fund of Funds and and taking its total commitment for startups to $3 billion.
The funds newly included – Greycroft, Ion Pacific, Liberty City Ventures, Shorooq and Speedinvest – will open offices in Doha to help develop the city as a hub for tech entrepreneurs.
“This year, we move from momentum to scale,” Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, Qatar’s Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, said in a keynote address on Sunday at the opening of Web Summit Qatar, where he announced a raft of incentives, including a 10-year residency program for entrepreneurs, founders, investors, and senior executives.
“We invite you to put down roots and grow alongside a nation that invests in your future,” he said.
Now in its third year, the Middle East’s franchise of the famed Web Summit in Lisbon drew a record 1,600 startups, 85% of which came from outside of Qatar.
Musk, Ronaldo join Trump at black-tie dinner for Saudi leader
The White House hosted a heavyweight mix of political, business and sports figures at President Donald Trump’s black-tie dinner for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Tuesday night.
The guest list was filled with CEOs from tech and finance, including Tesla’s Elon Musk, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Apple’s Tim Cook, Citigroup’s Jane Fraser and Chevron’s Mike Wirth, Paramount’s David Ellison and Palantir’s Alex Karp.
Also present were Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, Pershing Square’s Bill Ackman, as well as 26North’s Josh Harris, and Dina Powell McCormick, the Vice Chairman of merchant bank BDT-MSD and former U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor. Another prominent guest was soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo, who plays in the Saudi Pro League.
The Saudi leader, wearing his traditional royal robe while standing in the East Room next to a tuxedo-clad Trump, hailed the close ties between the two countries that go back nine decades. Earlier in the day, he said Saudi Arabia’s investment in the U.S. could reach close to $1 trillion.
“We believe the opportunity is huge,” Prince Mohammed said. “We’re going to focus on implementation and keep increasing the opportunities between our… countries.”
Trump hosted the dinner of pistachio-crusted rack of lamb and sweet potato puree with his wife Melania, who wore a green strapless gown designed by Lebanese couturier Elie Saab.
Members of the Trump administration who attended included Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum,
and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.
GITEX, NorthStar draw techies to Dubai from around the world
By midday it was standing-room-only as one of the world’s biggest tech and AI gatherings kicked off.
Cramming into the exhibition halls at Dubai World Trade Center on Monday were exuberant crowds trying to get a glance of the future: from fully autonomous AI-powered cars to a pink feather-boa clad humanoid robot rubbing shoulders with its warm-blooded compatriots.
GITEX Global 2025, now in its 45th edition, and sister event Expand NorthStar, a startup and investor event running in parallel at Dubai Harbor, brought the city to a standstill early on Monday morning, prompting the police issue a notice to motorists to avoid the area if possible.
The five-day event, which has drawn more than 6,800 companies from 180 countries, is growing so big that it will be moved next year to Expo City Dubai, the futuristic site developed for Expo 2020 Dubai, which has now been transformed into a permanent city and free zone. It will also be shuffled forward into December to coincide with the cooler tourist season.
Dubai’s ruler Sheikh Mohamed bin Rashid, along with his son, Dubai Crown Prince Sheikh Hamdan, were seen touring exhibits with a large entourage in tow on Monday morning.
Among the major companies participating are Abu Dhabi AI powerhouse G42, Google, Microsoft, Huawei, AMD, Cerebras, Qualcomm, and Tenstorrent.
Hassan Aljohani, the Vice President for Business Development at Saudi Arabia’s Neo Space Group, came to the event to show off the company’s near real-time geospatial intelligence and a sovereign mapping platform to the wider region.
“We see GITEX as the ultimate platform to showcase and establish familiarity, connections and partnerships with the like-minded innovative institutions,” Aljohani said.
Al Zeyoudi goes to Las Vegas to pitch Emirati tech at CES
Every October, the tech world floods into the UAE for GITEX. This week, the UAE joins the global crowd in Las Vegas for CES, the mother of all tech conferences.
Leading the Emirati corporate leaders and policymakers on the U.S. pilgrimage to the annual Consumer Electronics Show is Dr. Thani Al Zeyoudi, the UAE’s globe-trotting Minister of State for Foreign Trade.
In Las Vegas, Al Zeyoudi participated in a CES panel on geopolitical challenges to global trade, where he described the UAE’s efforts to bridge markets and facilitate trade flows, according to an Emirates News Agency dispatch.
He also highlighted the country’s three-year-old campaign to sign more than two dozen free trade agreements around the world.
“The UAE’s dynamic tech ecosystem… offers fresh opportunities for US companies looking to scale their operations and access high-growth markets,” Al Zeyoudi said at CES on Wednesday.
“As we expand our partnerships in advanced technology, we aim to foster innovation, create jobs, and accelerate the adoption of next-generation technologies.”
During the three-day visit, Al Zeyoudi met with executives from tech companies specializing in AI, health, and automotive technologies, including Accenture, Qualcomm, the Consumer Technology Association, Skylo and MGM Resorts International, the state news agency said.
Oil, tech and Tom Cruise fuel surge in Mideast IPOs
When Jamjoom Pharma sold a 30% stake in its generic drug business on Saudi Arabia’s Tadawul stock exchange in June, the company raised $336 million and generated new interest in the Gulf amid an IPO drought in other markets.
The Saudi listing came two weeks after an IPO in the United Arab Emirates by Adnoc Logistics and Services, a subsidiary of the national oil company, raised $769 million. Likely to follow soon is an initial share sale by Abu Dhabi-based Lulu Group International, which operates hyper-supermarkets across the Middle East and obtained $2.7 billion from banks this month to refinance debt.
The new crop of stock offerings follows a record year of 51 IPOs across the Middle East and North Africa region that has brought investors flocking to Dubai, Riyadh and other Gulf financial centers. Led by sovereign wealth funds in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, whose assets have ballooned with high oil and gas prices, companies are recognizing new opportunities to raise cash.
“It starts with a lot of noise and then the noise turns into actual investment,” Ryan Lemand, co-founder and CEO of Neovision Wealth Management in Abu Dhabi, told The Circuit.
The noise has been amplified by the massive construction projects, expanding government spending and barrier-breaking foreign activities, such as the merger of the Saudi-backed LIV Golf tournament with the PGA Tour and the UAE’s cultivating Hollywood stars such as Tom Cruise, whose latest “Mission Impossible” movie was partly filmed in Abu Dhabi.
“This places the region on the world map,” Lemand said. “Whether it’s the movies or talking about a new economic area called Neom in Saudi Arabia, which is hiring engineers from Europe and the U.S. People start getting interested in them and say, ‘Hey, I want to place my money in these ventures. Because these ventures are new, they’re going to go up in value. So I want to be an early contributor to this.’”
Also contributing to the buzz was the UAE’s agile management of the COVID-19 pandemic and its tax-free economy, which drew Russian tycoons, crypto billionaires and investment bankers who have sparked a boom in real estate sales. In turn, asset managers such as AllianceBernstein and Brevan Howard are opening new offices in the country, along with dozens of hedge funds.
Among the IPOs currently in the pipeline are Ducab, a Dubai-based maker of cables and wiring; Alef Education, an education technology business in Abu Dhabi; and Dubai Taxi Corp., investment managers said. Other Emirati companies that may soon start selling shares include Pure Harvest, which grows crops in arid environments; Kitopi, a platform for managing restaurants’ cloud kitchens; and Dubizzle, an online classified advertising firm.
Companies in the MENA region staged 13 IPOs in the second quarter, a 44% increase over the same period a year ago, according to a report by the consulting firm Ernst & Young. Demand for the public share sales is skyrocketing, as evidenced by Adnoc L&S’s IPO, which was 163 times oversubscribed. The popularity of state asset sales has led Dubai to outline plans for privatizing 10 enterprises, including the toll-road company, Salik, and its water and electricity utility, Dewa, which went public last year.
Another recent phenomenon is IPOs by family-owned companies such as Al Ansari Financial Services, the UAE’s largest chain of currency exchange offices, which raised $210 million on Dubai’s stock market in April.
“The second quarter of 2023 confirmed that MENA IPOs are not experiencing the downward trend witnessed globally,” Brad Watson, EY MENA’s IPO and transaction leader, said in the report. “The UAE and Saudi Arabia continue to be the most active markets in the MENA region in terms of both the number and size of IPOs.”
Interest in the Saudi market has been growing since 2019 when Saudi Aramco, the world’s biggest oil producer, raised more than $29 billion by selling off just 1.5% of the company. In the past five years, market capitalization of Saudi Arabia’s publicly held companies has soared by about 475%, with 269 listed on the stock exchange compared to 188 at the end of 2017.
Masdar, Abu Dhabi’s renewable energy company, sold its first green bond last month on the London Stock Exchange, raising $750 million to fund new solar, wind and other clean energy projects in a round that was more than five times oversubscribed.
“This is a defining moment for Masdar and climate finance,” said Masdar Chairman Sultan Al Jaber, who is president-designate for the United Nations Cop28 environmental conference scheduled for the end of November in Dubai. “The demand for green bonds is extremely high and will enable investment in renewable energy projects, many of which will be in developing economies and climate-vulnerable countries.”
Amid global fears of recession and the recent meltdown in financing for startups in the U.S. and Europe – illustrated by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse this year – many of the world’s best-known investors are looking to the Gulf for salvation. Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz, co-founders of venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz, appeared onstage in late March at the Saudi-funded Global Priority Summit in Miami and said they were so impressed with the enthusiasm they found in Riyadh that they brought top executives from their portfolio companies to pitch there.
Ghanem Nuseibeh, a founder of Cornerstone Global Associates, which has offices in London and Dubai, compares the current atmosphere in Saudi Arabia and the UAE to the UK’s privatization campaign and economic rebound under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the late 1980s.
“They are diversifying away from fossil fuels and, in addition to making themselves more competitive economies, they are also making themselves more attractive to international investors,” he said.
UAE incubator prepares startups led by women to confront desert
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — When Ghita Bahmad, a Moroccan-born researcher working on innovative ways to grow fruits and vegetables in the desert, needed to raise funds for her vertical-farming startup last year, she went to the Dubai Expo.
Bearing the name The Food Engineer, Bahmad’s Canada-based company uses a misting technique called “aeroponics” to grow walls of lettuce and herbs that require no soil and 95 percent less water than conventional farming. At an Expo networking event, Bahmad rubbed shoulders with a range of Middle East investors and emerged with backing from Dana, a business incubator launched two years ago that supports so-called “desert-tech” companies founded by women.
“We have made it our mission to install aeroponic growing systems all over the world,” Bahmad told The Circuit in an interview. “We contribute to the development of local know-how in urban horticulture and to the progress of countries towards food autonomy.”
Dana is among the young Middle East firms that have cropped up amid growing cooperation between the Gulf states and Israel, which culminated with the Abraham Accords in 2020. The three women who founded the business include an American, a Jewish Israeli and a Palestinian citizen of Israel. After a vetting process for early stage startups, the firm’s venture arm is prepared to invest between $350,000 and $1 million in the companies, in partnership with other funds and investors, co-founder Katie Wachsberger said. It expects to have about $25 million in capital and make its first investments in mid-2023, she said.
“At the end of the day, creating sustainable solutions for our region must be commercially viable,” said Wachsberger, 30, a native New Yorker who runs the Abu Dhabi headquarters as chief operating officer. “Otherwise, we can’t expect our economies to transform as they must toward carbon neutrality and food security.”
Companies currently working with Dana include Israel’s BioCloud, which produces an herbal pesticide used in cultivating medical marijuana and other greenhouse crops; SunBox, a solar-energy startup from the Gaza Strip; and Eco-Bricks, a maker of bricks recycled from construction sludge, which is based in the West Bank city of Hebron. Businesses from the UAE and Saudi Arabia are also connected with Dana, Wachsberger said.
Established in 2020, Dana is led by CEO Zada Haj, 28, who grew up in the Arab town of Kfar Yassif in northern Israel. The firm is named for her Palestinian mentor, Dana Salah, who died in a car accident while they were working together on a startup. Shirley Sahar is the company’s Tel Aviv-based chief strategy officer.
The firm’s investors include Joanne Wilson, owner of Gotham Gal Ventures, and Susan Danziger, founder of Eutopia Holdings. On its advisory board are Maha Al Fahim, co-founder of Abu Dhabi-based High Water Venture Partners; British social impact investor Sophia Swire; and David Sable, former CEO and chairman of global marketing firm Y&R.
As part of its desert-tech mandate, Dana works with companies that are involved in agriculture, water conservation, food security, waste management and renewable energy, Wachsberger said. Before investing, the firm supports young companies through its venture builder program, which includes mentorship, product advising, corporate design guidance, feasibility testing and business development.
In June, Dana signed an agreement with Masdar City to build a beta site in Abu Dhabi that will enable its companies to test their products in greenhouses, net houses and open farming plots. Masdar is a unit of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, Mubadala Investment Co.
Dana’s founders decided to make the UAE their base of operations because of its leading position in Middle East and world markets, Wachsberger explained. “It is the country leading the way in creating an ecosystem for innovation around sustainability and food security, specifically Abu Dhabi,” she said.
Dana’s core vision is of developing relationships in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region where the pressing issues of climate change and food security are addressed collaboratively, Wachsberger said. The founders believe those critical areas could become among the most profitable for investors and represent a great opportunity for women leaders.
“It is clear to us that women are not empowered until they are financially independent and influential in the private sector,” Wachsberger said. “We are continuously inspired by what female founders can do and are optimistic about what a women-led future for MENA will be like.”
For Israeli high-tech, 2021 was a ‘bumper’ year says head of Innovation Authority
There aren’t too many people who would characterize 2021 as a “bumper” year for their field, but that is exactly the word that Dror Bin, CEO of the Israel Innovation Authority, uses to describe the country’s high-tech sector during the second year of a global pandemic that brought additional lockdowns, border closures and successive waves of virus variants.
“I don’t think anyone would have expected Israeli high-tech to peak in such a way,” Bin, who was appointed CEO of the authority a year ago, told The Circuit in a recent interview. “It was possibly the best year ever for Israeli high-tech.”
Bin’s decisive statement is backed up by staggering data collected by the authority, an independent public entity that works to bolster Israel’s innovation ecosystem and serves as a bridge to the government.
During 2021, Israeli companies raised more than $22 billion in capital; exits, mergers and acquisitions, and initial public offerings totaled $80 billion; the accumulated market capital of Israeli companies trading on Wall Street was $300 billion; and there was a record 79 unicorns, companies valued at $1 billion and up.
In addition, the IIA noted that Israel’s high-tech sector now accounts for some 50% of Israel’s total exports and for 15% of the country’s GDP. Ten percent of Israelis work in high-tech, paying some 25% of the country’s total income tax. National expenditure on civilian R&D stands at 4.9% of GDP, second only to Korea and ahead of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average of 2.47%. It also places third, after the U.S. and China, in the number of companies (116) listed on NASDAQ.
The normalization agreements between Israel and four Arab states in 2020 has also boosted the sector. The newly established UAE-Israel Business Council, which has united more than 6,000 Emirati and Israel businesspeople, is predicting that bilateral trade could reach $2 billion in 2022, an increase of over 50% from 2021 and many of the newly formed ties are in the tech sector.
“I’ve been working in Israeli high-tech for 25 years and two decades ago would never have dreamt that we would reach where we are today,” said Bin, former president and CEO of RAD Communications, a Tel Aviv-based company that manufactures networking equipment.
The COVID-19 pandemic, which forced many businesses and services into the virtual space, actually “stimulated the demand for high-tech,” Bin explained, adding that Israeli companies were quick to adapt to the new environment and the government stepped in to keep investment flowing into the startup sphere.
“There was a digital transformation, and many things that once took place in the physical world had to move to the virtual world, which increased demand,” he told JI. “The Israeli DNA has the ability to be flexible and to adapt quickly to changing circumstances, also there is a long history of entrepreneurs, investors and government policies that benefit the sector.”
“When [COVID] started, the market went into shock; many investors were reluctant to invest because the uncertainty was high,” Bin explained. “We got money from the government and, for a short while, invested in different types of startups until investors were ready to return — this was one of the main reasons we did not see a fall in the number of startups in the country.”
Established in 2016, the Israel Innovation Authority has three main functions — investing in research and development of innovative and ground-breaking products with an annual investment budget of NIS 2 billion ($640,000); preparing for future technology trends; and enabling regulation, including removing obstacles and finding ways to expand human capital for the high-tech sector.
After the “bumper” year, Bin said he expects the industry to keep growing and expanding, with an emphasis on maintaining Israel’s high-tech inside the country, in contrast to the past, and diversifying into new areas of innovation.
“There has been a paradigm shift that will change many things going forward,” he said. “Traditionally, Israel’s start-up ecosystem was based on the establishment of small companies whose goal was to find a multinational or American company to buy it out.”
Now, Bin said, there are around 10-15 companies that have become giants in their space and are choosing to remain in Israel. He estimates that a further 100 Israeli companies have the potential to become leaders in one of the global markets.
Bin also said that Israel’s high-tech market was beginning to branch out in new directions.
“If Israel was strong in cyber and fintech or the enterprise software market in the past, we have seen a shift into new markets like food-tech, specifically alternative proteins, agritech, and Bio-Convergence (developing new medicine and medical devices),” he said. “The imagination can keep on working here full-time to find many more exciting new things.”
In order to further facilitate the growth, IIA has been working to ease Israeli bureaucracy, loosening regulations in order to allow Israeli companies to flourish. Bin gives the example of the drone market, a focus in recent years for the authority. Bringing together Israeli regulators, the Israeli Aviation Authority and industry innovators, he said, was already “defining the playground so that all parties could benefit from it.”
He also said IIA has invested in one of Israeli high-tech’s biggest challenges — the shortage of manpower. “We intervened in this about two years ago and started implementing new models of recruiting manpower to enter the industry,” said Bin, describing a program for re-training for those with academic qualifications and another to bring in underrepresented populations such as women (who make up roughly 30% of the sector’s employees), Arabs and the ultra-Orthodox.
Bin said there was no single element to Israel’s success in creating a booming global innovation hub. “What you need to create this magic is for it all to happen in the right place at the right time,” he told JI.
Citing a combination of Israel’s risk-taking culture, the country’s necessity to develop defense systems and a very smart government policy, Bin added: “There is also the fact that Israel is so small, and being small is an advantage when it comes to innovation, which often evolves in dense places where everyone knows everyone,” he said. “All these things have blended together well to create wave after wave of innovation.”
“No matter how you want to look at the Israeli ecosystem, whether its capital raised, quality of capital, unicorns, IPOs, whatever metric you want to look at, the Israeli tech ecosystem grew exponentially in 2021, it was our best year yet by far,” concurred Hillel Fuld a tech columnist and startup advisor.
Explaining the growth, Fuld referred to last week’s Torah portion, where it talks about the Jews in Egypt and how the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied.
“We have this tendency as Jews to thrive under pressure,” he said. “There is an inverse correlation between terror and innovation, meaning you would think that if there is more terror there would be less innovation but that is not the case at all, so in 2021, the year of a pandemic, you would think it would be slow or there would be a decrease in innovation but in reality, that was not the case.”
“To say I was surprised, I was not surprised because all indications showed that we were going to keep growing but the rate of growth did surprise me because it was just so explosive this year,” said Fuld.
