Growth Capital in the AI Era Empowering Founders, Building National Champions

Your excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, it's a great pleasure to be with you here today in the sunny city of Abu Dhabi. Um, today I'm going to be talking my other hats as chairman of the Emirates growth fund. And it's only fitting to use this opportunity uh a big platform like Abuabi Finance week to talk about a unique offering that was in the making for a whole year. Uh in my previous capacity in 2020 I was assigned the portfolio of entrepreneurship andmemes and it was a very unique time to really watch closely a sector that's very vital but at the same time very volatile. It was during the peak of covid scarcity of funding scarcity of business.

So we really were able to analyze what do entrepreneurs need. And what we found out initially from a financial perspective that even thoughmemes represent 90% of all registered companies. They also employ more than 80% of all private sector jobs and they contribute more than 60% of none old GDP. However, when it comes to financing, they only get 10% of lending and that is a great um obstacle for these companies. Now, what we saw as well is that on the private equity side or sorry, the venture capital side, there's no short of capital in the UEE.

If you take the average of the past five or 10 years of all the VC capital employed in the MINA region 50% is in the UAE and the remaining 50% is across all MINA whether it's international equity or local uh funds were quite funded on the early stage and then came the stage B funding which was also increasingly available in the UAE. However, there was one specific sector that we saw was underserved which is the brick and mortarmemes. Companies with the likes of Talabat, Karim and others have no issue raising funding across several rounds. But when you come to an entrepreneur that's creating a brick and mortar company, an industrial company, an agri business, a healthcare business, it's very difficult to grow that company. So as a governmentowned entity we decided as EDB the Emirates Development Bank that in some cases lending is not the right tool to grow.

You need growth capital and with that came the vision of Emirates growth fund and what we saw was the biggest challenge that the market does not understand the proposition. So let me just try to make it very simple. To be eligible for funding and we have 1 billion dhams as stage one of funding, you'd have to be making at least 10 million dhams in revenue or foresight into profitability. We invest between 10 to 50 million in these companies and we only take a minority stake. So 20 to 49%.

What happens there is that we give you growth capital that's almost equal to the valuation of the company. So 50/50 or 49 51%. But also we make sure that we add value beyond equity. We make sure that we get an international or independent board member through our network through our partners. For every company we invest in, we bring the best global expertise to help that company look into the future of growth because it's very easy to grow within the UEE.

But then to expand, you need a different skill set. We also ensure secondly beyond the oversight and the strategic oversight, we also ensure governance. We mandate that these companies get their books together and put a proper governance because in the future we want to exit. We don't want to stay there for the long term. We want to be there for we're patient we say for 5 to 10 years but our goal is not to stay there indefinitely.

So again we are very happy to be here today. Uh if you have any companies that are in industrial sector, healthcare sector, food security, advanced technology, please make sure you make them aware that there is a comp there's a fund called IM growth fund and we were more than happy to be the engine of growth that will help these companies grow and add value to the UE. Once again, very happy to be here today and I wish you all the best day today convening this great event in Apabi. Thank you very much.