Lucy: Further Ventures is backed by Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth and works alongside founders to help build companies from the ground up. Joining me today is Robbie Nakarmi, Partner at Further Ventures. Robbie, thank you so much for joining us today.
Pleasure to be here, Lucy. Thank you.
Further Ventures distinguishes itself from traditional VCs that just write cheques. Can you tell us about that model?
Further Ventures began as a sub-specialised subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund ADIC. The journey has since evolved into an independent firm, with our background changing from a focus on venture building to direct investment. We are very lucky to count Lunate, who remains an anchor investor. One of the interesting things that differentiates us is that we have built companies inside our venture capital fund as well — which is quite unusual, as most investors are more passive.
What opportunities are you seeing right now in digital assets, AI, and fintech?
All of those topics are of interest to both traditional finance and new financial institutions. What we are increasingly seeing is convergence — that is the key word you are going to be hearing a lot in the industry. Traditional finance is coming towards blockchain and blockchain-native players are coming towards traditional finance. We will increasingly see crypto investment products integrated into traditional distribution mediums on Wall Street, as well as Wall Street methods and practices coming into crypto. It is very exciting.
You are a home-grown Abu Dhabi fund. How does the Abu Dhabi ecosystem help what you do?
It is absolutely critical. Having the buy-in of the government through the financial services regulator, as well as the broader ecosystem through ADGM and Hub71 and the various incubators and accelerators — this is really important for ensuring a thriving ecosystem. We go from Abu Dhabi to the world — being connected to Abu Dhabi and having the relationships we have there are actually a critical part of our unique proposition that we can give to global founders who want to build here.
You led the Series A for DFNS. They just partnered with ADX. How did that journey look?
Clarice and Chris and the rest of the team at DFNS have done a fantastic job. They have been through many iterations of their product and have always been on the leading edge technologically. Alongside the change in the industry, there has been a realisation that custody infrastructure and wallet infrastructure are important not only to financial institutions but to national markets — and ADX is an example of that. DFNS is very excited to partner with ADX because they offer something quite unique amongst other custody and wallet partners. One of those differentiating factors is that they comply with all UAE data residency regulations that financial institutions are required to comply with — and the offering is UAE-hosted, which is quite reassuring for UAE financial institutions.
How do you help startups build relationships with regulators?
Our focus has always been looking at what edge cases will enable new products and services in financial services in the future — and financial services by default means regulated. We always build businesses that, even if they might not be regulated today, have the potential to be regulated when regulations allow. In crypto and digital assets, we have seen a great trend led by Abu Dhabi of constructive engagement with the industry — now followed by the CFTC and SEC in the US as well. ADGM in particular was one of the first regulators in the world to put out bespoke digital asset regulations in 2018. We ourselves are a licensed investment manager based in ADGM. So we talk to them very regularly — not just about regulations but about where is the industry going, and what technological developments might change how they need to regulate things, especially in DeFi.
What is your outlook for digital assets and AI over the next 24 months?
Retail sentiment is let’s say a bit negative — but institutional sentiment is terribly bullish, which is a phrase I always like to use. When you go in the room with the big banks — JP Morgan, Franklin Templeton, BNY — all the leading institutional players are involved in a lot of different initiatives. The banks are going to catch up. They are actively hiring the people they need. They are sometimes creating entirely bespoke offerings. Tokenisation is number one for me in our industry — that is what every regulator, every bank, every major asset manager is focused on. And AI is the mega trend for all industries including ours. We are going to see increasingly novel use cases — trading, compute, securing blockchains against the threat of AI. And quantum computing is a potential threat to cryptography. There are a lot of big brains working on that problem set today.
Thank you so much Robbie. And congratulations on DFNS — that is an amazing landmark.
You are very welcome. Happy to be here. Thank you very much.
