What MENA investors actually want — the unwritten rules nobody puts in their thesis

Published: 2026-04-09T04:42:00.000Z

We sat with five investors across Karachi, Dubai, and Riyadh and asked them to be honest. What came back wasn't the standard pitch advice. It was the stuff they talk about after you leave the room.

The actual decision — the one made in a partners' meeting on a Tuesday afternoon when someone asks whether to move to a second call or quietly let the founder follow up into a void — gets made on entirely different grounds. Grounds that are specific, regional, and honest in ways that no published investment thesis ever will be. We spent two months talking to five investors who operate across Pakistan, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Some are GPs at dedicated early-stage funds. One runs the investment arm of a family office split between Karachi and London. One is a regional partner at a growth fund with LPs across the Gulf. We gave them the option to speak on background. Most took it for the sharper observations. What follows is as close to the real conversation as we could get it on the page. Samir Al-Rashidi — General Partner, early-stage fund · Dubai & Riyadh "Every other week someone walks in and tells me the market is worth forty billion dollars. I've got the same Bain and KPMG reports on my shelf that they used to build that number. It doesn't move me. The question I'm actually sitting with is much simpler: why is this particular person, in this room, the one who figures out how to own two percent of that market before someone with more money and more connections decides they want it? That's the pitch. Everything else is decoration." Fatima Qureshi — Investment Director, family office · Karachi & London "I've been pitched the same mobile wallet idea, in slightly different clothing, no fewer than four times in three years. Four different teams, four different decks, more or less identical hypothesis. You know what was different each time? The people. The first team fell apart when their lead engineer quit. The second couldn't get a bank partnership off the ground because nobody on the team had ever sat across a table from a bank compliance officer before. The idea was never the problem. It was never going to be the problem. Pakistan has more unsolved problems than it has people willing to go through the pain of solving them. What's scarce isn't good ideas. It's teams that can actually move." Khalid Al-Omari — Regional Partner, growth fund · Riyadh "Foreign founders keep making the same mistake when they come to Saudi. They treat Vision 2030 like a PR backdrop — something to mention in the first slide so the local audience feels acknowledged. What they're missing is that it's a functional operating framework. Procurement flows through it. Licensing priorities are shaped by it. When SAMA accelerates open banking or when the Ministry of Tourism fast-tracks a new category of licence, that's not goodwill — that's a structural advantage for companies positioned to catch it. I ask every founder where their company sits inside that framework. If they give me a vague answer about 'the digital transformation of the Kingdom,' I'm already somewhere else in my head." Nada El-Sayed — Partner, seed fund · Cairo & Dubai "There was a period — roughly 2019 through early 2022 — when you could raise serious money in this region while being genuinely vague about your economics. The macro environment made it possible. Capital was cheap, the growth narrative was compelling, and enough people had watched Careem and Souq get acquired that everyone was happy to suspend disbelief. That window closed. Last quarter I sat through a pitch where the founder could tell me their GMV to two decimal places but had no idea what their gross margin looked like on a single transaction. I let them finish because I'm not rude. But the decision was made somewhere around slide nine." Raza Mirza — Angel & Scout, early-stage · Lahore & Dubai "The question founders dread, and I ask it every single time, is what they've personally put in. Not hours — money. I'm not asking because I think they need to have written a large check. I'm asking because the answer tells me something true about how they see this business. I backed a founder last year who had been consulting on the side, earning good money, and every rupee he made for eighteen months went straight back into paying for customer interviews and product validation. He didn't tell me that to impress me. He told me because it was just what he'd done. That's a very different founder from the one who's raised half a million from their network but is still taking their full salary and hasn't touched their own savings." The five things they're actually evaluating — and what they'll never say publicly. None of this is random. Across five conversations, five different fund sizes, and four different countries, the same anxieties kept surfacing. The language changed. The underlying concerns didn't. Rule 01 — The team is the investment thesis. The idea is just the starting position. There is a version of this insight that gets said so often it has stopped meaning anything. Of course team matters. Everyone says team matters. What doesn't get said is the specific way team gets evaluated