Tourism Development Fund
Saudi Arabian state-backed fund that supports private-sector tourism investment and, through TDF Grow, runs incubator, accelerator and hackathon programmes for tourism startups.
Industry: Tourism investment and financing | Location: Saudi Arabia | Founded: 2020
About Tourism Development Fund
The Tourism Development Fund is a Saudi Arabian state-backed fund for the tourism sector. It describes itself as the national steward of tourism investment in Saudi Arabia and works to support tourism entrepreneurship in the country. Wikipedia reports that it was established by royal order in June 2020, after the creation of the Ministry of Tourism, to help private-sector projects obtain financing, and that it falls under the National Development Fund.
Qusai bin Abdullah Al-Fakhri is the fund's chief executive officer, and he was quoted in that role in July 2025 and again in June 2026.
The fund's non-financial work is run through TDF Grow, which it calls its non-financial enablement arm. In July 2025 the fund launched three programmes under TDF Grow. The Grow Tourism Incubator is a ten-month programme for early-stage tourism startups, with shared workspaces, legal, marketing and logistics support, workshops, training and mentoring, delivered in person at the fund's headquarters and virtually. Tourism Hackathons and Bootcamps is a five-month programme in the Asir, Al-Ahsa and Madinah regions that takes participants from idea to prototype. The Grow Tourism Accelerator is a three-month programme for startups that are scaling, which had graduated 99 participants in earlier editions and connects them with investors. At that point TDF Grow said it had supported 8,800 beneficiaries, including entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized enterprises.
In June 2026 the fund marked the completion of the first Grow Tourism Incubator, delivered with the travel company Almosafer. It supported 30 startups, 20 on the in-person track and 10 on the virtual track, and provided more than 230 business development sessions, more than 20 workshops, 35 training opportunities and 30 service grants, along with a learning visit to H-Farm in Italy. The startups worked on tourism technology, digital platforms, visitor experiences, cultural and heritage tourism and AI-powered tools. TechScoop covered the completion in its June 2026 report on Saudi Arabia's tourism startup pipeline.