In 2013, MENA venture capital was a handful of angels writing small cheques. Today, sovereign wealth funds anchor early-stage fintech funds out of the region. My next guest has lived that entire arc from angel investing to sovereign capital. Joining me is Tammer Qaddumi, Co-Founder and General Partner at VentureSouq. Welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
What is the biggest change in MENA venture from 2013 all the way up to 2026?
Venture itself went from essentially not being a real thing — not a real asset class — into something that is becoming a central piece of the economy of the region. That means institutional money, large scale, professionalism. We have seen that evolution from when we were starting as an organic community just messing around, into something that is now a very real part of the region’s economy. There has been a dramatic change and we have sort of ridden that and benefited from it.
You now have a dedicated fintech fund. What makes financial services still a standout opportunity in the region today?
If you are just looking at the pure innovation of fintech, you are not going to see that MENA is necessarily on the vanguard. But what you do see is that we are part of a transition from largely centralised economies into something that is more distributed. We saw that financial services was going to be the entry point of that transition. Each country in the GCC has around 20 banks, 20 banking licences — already a distributed market. And those banks had more than their fill lending to government and tier-one credit-rated clients, earning a large net interest margin from that client base. They were all sleeping on under-the-surface opportunities — small business banking, large segments of consumer banking. It was not necessarily the technological innovation that we were seeing. It was the market opportunity. When we raised our first fund in 2021, we said we should over-index into fintech — in fact, only invest in fintech. And that bet proved to be sound. Most of the liquidity that has come into the venture ecosystem has gone into fintech.
You now have PIF and Mubadala on your cap table. How does sovereign capital change early-stage investing?
For us it allowed us to operate at a scale that made us professional. We went from raising $25,000 to $50,000 to $100,000 cheques — we had 1,200 investors at one point coming through SPVs and made over 200 investments. That is not a professionally run outfit. When the sovereigns made clear they intended to back regional managers, that allowed us to transition into something with proper governance standards, compliance, and diligence practices. I do not think the sovereigns are given enough credit for leading on this. It is often perceived that sovereigns are following or investing into market leaders. But what they did in venture is they were willing to take the risk before anybody else did. Since the sovereigns backed groups like ours, we have seen big institutional money from outside follow their lead. They are going to be rewarded handsomely for taking that risk. And they should be absolutely applauded.
How has Abu Dhabi’s role in regional venture evolved?
Abu Dhabi allowed us to get ourselves up and moving before very strict regulatory oversight. I am not saying the regulatory environment is weak or lenient — but it is a system you can work with as you develop a business model. They are willing to shape regulation around what you are doing, as long as you are being transparent with them. Early on as we were building syndicates and raising money from a long tail of investors for early-stage investments, we were doing it at such a small scale and it was such a novel thing that we had the implicit approval from several regulatory groups once they figured out what we were doing and that we were trustworthy. By that time they had evolved using data from us and other operators — and they created a venture capital regime that is now one of the most trusted in the world. In the Web3 world they were very progressive. In how AI gets rolled out, you are seeing the same progressiveness. If the government decides to take a certain direction from a technology standpoint, it can make an executive decision. This is a CEO-driven economy. That makes it incredibly efficient.
Thank you Tammer. Thank you for joining us today.
Thanks for having me.
