UAE: The ‘Hottest’ Up and Coming Startup Spot
We write this to you in our summer wizard cloaks, dangling our feet from Burj Khalifa, and overlooking an ultimate startup haven — the UAE. But we will be generous enough to interrupt our scheduled ride on the world’s fastest roller-coaster and Red Dune Safari to give you a spotlight of what this thriving startup landscape has to offer.
Dominating 30 percent of all deals in 2018, the UAE is the most active in the Middle East and North Africa ecosystem. Around 50 percent of all companies registered in its second wealthiest Emirate, Dubai, are early-stage startups. The UAE gave birth to stars like the ride-hailing app Careem acquired by Uber in a staggering US $3.1 billion deal, the US $1 billion worth e-commerce Noon.com, and the US $580 million worth Souq.com acquired by Amazon.
In this UAE Spotlight issue, we’ve got a pair who took their dream from Canada to Dubai joining forces with a topnotch product manager. The results? A high growth online investment platform promoting financial literacy and smart investing. We also have a trio of serial entrepreneurs — previously of Mumzworld, BMB Group and CentralTickets — building an innovative operational kitchen to cook and deliver food on behalf of other brands.
Buckle up, this land means business!
Investing Smart for Young Professionals
Personal wealth management is not easy. A 2018 Bankrate survey shows that 19 percent of US adults “save nothing” of their annual income, and 21 percent save only 5 percent or less. Recognizing this as a global problem, Sarwa built a smart investment platform and automated advisory to give young professionals their own diversified investment portfolio. It’s more like eToro but for everyday young professionals.
Since its founding in 2016, Sarwa which literally means “wealth” in Arabic, has been named on Forbes Middle East Top 20 FinTech Companies. The startup is also regulated by the Dubai Financial Services Authority as FinTech gains more ground in the UAE. It raised US $1.5 million since inception backed by leading VCs, including Shorooq Investments, Middle East Venture Partners, 500 Startups, Women’s Angel Investor Network, Hala Ventures, and Saned Ventures. They already have over 5000 MENA based users under their advising.
Does Sarwa promise the youth riches and glistening treasures in return for their investment? Sadly not. But it aims to heighten financial literacy and inform users of the true risk/value of their investments, and what they are putting their savings into. That said, they do have a ‘Sarwa Genie’ explaining the magic of their portfolios!
Founding Team
This founding team’s experience surely backs up its promise. CTO Jad Sayegh speaks about the birth of their startup idea in Montreal, before CEO Mark Chahwan and he decided to take it to Dubai, where they connected with CMO Nadine Mezher. With the two having Bachelors in Finance and Engineering from McGill in Canada, we’ll assume they must’ve bumped into one another after class! Mark and Jad have been on Forbes’ list of 30 Under 30 Arabs in 2018 for founding Sarwa at the age of 24.
Mark was Strategy Consultant and Management Consulting Analyst at Accenture. He also has experience in asset management and investment banking at BLOMINVEST Bank in Lebanon and Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ), one of the top institutional investors in North America. Sarwa’s tech head, Jad, was a software developer at Vigilant Global and Ericsson in Canada. He was also a Field Engineer at the The GBS Group.
Nadine Mezher, went from a Professor of Fashion at the French Fashion University Esmod Dubai, to starting her own fashion house and consultancy. She worked with the UAE government on developing strategic partnerships for festivals that aim at attracting more tourists. Soon enough, she dedicated herself to brand strategy as a consultant for various companies.
At the AWS Summit in Dubai, Nadine said early stage startups should have the ability to scale as soon as they can to share their solutions with the world. “Our recommendation is to not focus on engineering perfection, and to just allow [services like] the cloud or the internet to help you change the status quo within the industry you operate in.” And they did just that!
Nourishing the food on demand business
Raise your hand if you’ve ever fantasized about creating your own fine-dining restaurant. But while it’s fun to mentally create some cool culinary concepts for an imaginary brand, quality maintenance and what happens behind kitchen doors can be a real nightmare.
Kitopi, which literally stands for Kitchen Operations Innovations, cooks and delivers food on behalf of other food brands and supports restaurants with everything from infrastructure, logistics, software, tech, supply, and ingredients. This 2018 startup helps restaurants open delivery-only locations with minimum capital expenditure and time.
Founding Team
An entrepreneur at heart with a passion for bringing ideas to life, scaling them up, and investing in startups, CEO Mohamad Yoland Ballout previously co-founded BMB Group — one of the Middle East’s largest confectionary and ingredients businesses, which he exited in 2016 as a successful 1,200 employee factory. He was chosen among 35 high-impact Endeavor entrepreneurs in the same year. Was this his lucky year? “Being just an investor bores me, and being just an entrepreneur has the stress back. I love the thrill, but I also love the investment,” he told the National.
CGO Bader Ataya co-founded Mumzworld, a premium mother and child e-commerce marketplace, and one of the top 10 tech investment deals in the region in 2018 raising US $20 million Series B. Bader also worked as an Alliances Consultant at Oracle. He was Executive Committee Member at Cambridge University Entrepreneurs, a student-run business creation competition supporting entrepreneurship and innovation. Bader interned at Google while doing his MBA in Finance at Cambridge.
A digital strategist with a passion for using technology to solve social and organizational problems, CTO Saman Darkan, wore many hats over the years including marketer, programmer, manager, researcher, and analyst. As Digital Transformation Director at ARC International, he led digitization efforts, implementing procedural systems and software automation. He also built an automated real estate consultancy pricing tool. Saman founded CentralTickets, a self-service ticketing solution, which won a marketing accelerator prize of US $50,000. He has a BS in Management Information Systems from California State University, Chico.
Word on the street is Saman hates fax machines and wants them destroyed. We implore him to reconsider. You never know when a cat has an urgent fax to send across!
Here it was, our brief stay in this heated ecosystem that’s certainly to be reckoned with. From ‘fin’ to food tech and all that’s in between, the UAE’s early stage power will continue to prove itself by the looks of our numbers. We are sure to come back!
How do we shortlist companies?
Aingel’s Sorcerer is designed to help you discover great startups early.
Here is how we do it in a nutshell. First, we use different sources and automated tools to detect new startups early. Then, we analyze and filter for startups that score high on our proprietary predictive algorithm. The algo was developed at NYU by Aingel’s co-founders.
Founding teams data include educational background, work history, startup experience and personality. We deduce character traits using AI from founders’ digital footprint. We also analyze aggregate team experience and composition.
The list above is further curated after analyzing types of startups to make sure they are VC-friendly. Startups do not pay to be listed.
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