Hussein Attar: 2019 changed the course of Saudi venture capital

Published: 2026-07-13T09:22:06.000Z

Ask Hussein Attar to pinpoint the moment Saudi Arabia's venture capital scene stopped being a hopeful experiment and became a real industry, and he lands on a single year: 2019. It was not simply a year of eye-catching acquisitions, but the moment the foundations clicked into place.

Ask Hussein Attar to pinpoint the moment Saudi Arabia's venture capital scene stopped being a hopeful experiment and became a real industry, and he lands on a single year: 2019. Attar, the chief executive of the billion-riyal investment firm Tech Invest Com and one of the more visible figures in the Kingdom's startup world, made the argument in a recent Argaam OnPoint conversation, and his framing is deliberately provocative. It was not simply a year of eye-catching acquisitions, he says, but the point at which the foundations of a genuine ecosystem clicked into place, with government initiatives beginning to support founders from their very earliest steps. The acquisitions came first, and they mattered enormously as proof of concept. In March 2019, Uber agreed to buy the regional ride-hailing champion Careem for 3.1 billion dollars, the largest technology exit the Middle East had ever seen and one that eclipsed Amazon's earlier purchase of Souq. For Saudi investors this was not an abstraction, since Al Tayyar, STC Ventures and Kingdom Holding were all on Careem's cap table and walked away with real returns. The deal did something no pitch deck could, demonstrating that a regional startup could be built, scaled and sold for billions, and that backing one was a serious financial proposition rather than a gamble. What Attar stresses, though, is that exits alone do not build an industry, and this is where the institutional plumbing of 2019 comes in. The period around it saw the state deliberately construct the machinery that early-stage founders had always lacked, above all through the Saudi Venture Capital Company, which was set up to pump money into funds and de-risk the whole asset class for private managers. Those early institutional decisions, he argues, are precisely why the market looks the way it does today, because they created a pipeline of capital flowing from seed stage upward rather than leaving founders to fend for themselves. Culture shifted too, as talented Saudis began leaving comfortable corporate jobs for startups in a way that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier. The regional context sharpens why this origin story matters. Saudi Arabia has since overtaken its neighbors to become the largest venture market in the Middle East, and the contrast with the UAE is instructive, since Dubai and Abu Dhabi built their reputations earlier and lighter, whereas the Kingdom engineered its ecosystem through concentrated state catalytic capital. Attar's own portfolio, spanning names like Foodics and Tamara, tracks that maturation from the 2019 inflection point to today's crowded, well-funded landscape. His underlying message to global investors is simple enough, that the Kingdom's rise was neither accident nor luck, but the compounding result of choices made at a moment most people were only watching the headline deals.