June 30, 2026

Inside 51 top VC investors in MENA: what does it take?

Happy last day of June. I’m in Europe for fam holidays but it feels like I never left the Gulf. A French 40°C may at times feel worse than a Kuwaiti 50°C! But we are finally spending some time outside Kuwait after 4 months…

The last two newsletters were dedicated to founders and today’s prime focus will be – guess who – investors. My teammate Dominika Malhas recently co-wrote a piece along with Seedstars’ Mal Filipowska on what it takes to become a leading VC investor in the region. They analyzed 51 individuals across 30 funds, tracking education, career origins, entry routes into VC and so on.

Full disclosure: I’m one of the investors under the microscope here. Holidays or not, I was never going to write this one myself. So, this issue was penned by Dominika.

Written by Dominika Malhas

This research started as someone else’s. Which is just a fancy way of saying I got inspired and ran with it.

A few months ago, my co-author Mal Filipowska, Head of Portfolio at Seedstars International Ventures, published a deep dive into the world’s top 120 investors. The patterns were hard to miss: Stanford, Harvard, engineering degrees, operator experience. One. Dominant. Archetype. Overwhelmingly American and male, shaped by a tight cluster of institutions and a well-worn path from technical background to startup to fund.

It made me wonder: does any of that hold here in MENA?

‍So together with Mal we ran the same analysis of 51 top VC investors in MENA across 30 funds, tracking education, career origins, entry routes into VC, geography, and what these investors do beyond deploying capital. The resulting research got published in the May-June issue of Inc. Arabia – and now I want to walk you through what we found, because some of it genuinely surprised us.

The region that went to America, then came home

Of the investors whose education we could track, 73% studied in the US. But the resemblance to the global benchmark ends there.

In the global cohort, a handful of institutions dominate: Stanford, Harvard, Wharton, MIT. In MENA, there’s no comparable university monopoly. Prestigious names appear, yes, but so do schools far outside the usual shortlist.

Most of these investors came back home. The boomerang effect is real and it’s especially pronounced among engineers – they were the ones most likely to take the long route home – staying on in the US to build careers and contacts before eventually coming back to the region.

Distinct geographical profiles:

1. Saudi Arabia: The Builder-Investor
‍
Half of the Saudi investors in the dataset have engineering backgrounds. 62% founded a startup before becoming a venture capitalist. Almost half still hold operator roles. Finance backgrounds are the minority. Zero started in consulting. What that adds up to is an investor class that looks a lot like the founders it backs: these are investors who still think like operators and in many cases, still are.

2. The UAE: The Institutionalist
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Finance dominates. Elite universities are significantly more common. Engineering backgrounds drop to 18%. Investors are more likely to be in primary investing roles and less likely to still be running companies on the side. More international mixing. That’s not better or worse; it reflects Dubai’s role as a hub that attracts internationally mobile capital professionals, and the kind of investor culture that naturally grows around that.

3. Egypt: The Joiner
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Egypt is the outlier that complicates any tidy two-archetype story. Egyptian investors in the dataset sit somewhere between the Saudi and UAE profiles – but the more telling difference is structural. In a market where venture infrastructure arrived earlier than in much of the region, many of the leading investors joined existing platforms rather than building new ones from scratch.

Image source: Inc. Arabia / Mal Filipowska, Dominika Malhas

‍What our ecosystem is still arguing about

Here’s my favorite stat: two-thirds of the investors in our dataset founded the fund they now work at. Half founded a company before that.

Think about what that means. These are people who, often simultaneously, built companies, built funds, and built the institutional infrastructure that makes a venture ecosystem function. The infrastructure is still being built by the same people who are supposed to be using it.

‍The first generation is in place, but what comes next?  

Will the Saudi builder-investor model spread?
Will the UAE’s institutional pull grow stronger?

What’s clear is that a new generation is coming and it will be more diverse, more internationally mixed, and less likely to have built the fund they work at from scratch.

Whether they inherit the archetypes this data describes, or quietly replace them, is the question the next version of this research will have to answer.

(We’ll be back with an update as soon as the new rankings are out!)

TL;DR

A new analysis of 51 top MENA VC investors across 30 funds finds the region is producing two to three distinct investor archetypes. Saudi Arabia’s top investors are builder-heavy; technical, founder-operator types still close to company-building. The UAE skews institutional: finance-trained, elite-educated, internationally mobile. Egypt’s leading investors are more likely to have joined existing platforms than built their own. The ecosystem is still in its founding chapter, and the definition of a top MENA investor remains wide open.

Our PJ is undergoing maintenance… which is why I ended up on a commercial flight to Europe :P

See you in July,
Hasan

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