Episode 16 - Building equity value alongside founders

The tech ecosystem across MENA is young but rapidly evolving. As recently as a few years ago, startups were restricted to fundraise from limited sources of capital, predominantly from a handful of VCs or angel investors. Today, with increasingly more capital entering the ecosystem, the capital base has diversified, with an innovative set of players such as super angels, solo GPs, and syndicates arriving and changing the game.

Investment in MENA-based companies has more than doubled in the last 2 years, going from ~$1B in investments in 2020 to ~$2.6B in 2021 according to Magnitt. With the increased availability of capital, early-stage companies are raising faster and larger rounds to double or triple down on growth, bolstering further startup activity. While capital is cheaper, it has also never been more important for founders to pause and reflect on who they want to partner with and who is best positioned to support them.

So for Episode 16 of our podcast, we chatted with Chad Fox, solo GP of Fox Ventures. Both Nuwa Capital and Fox Ventures have backed the stellar teams of baraka and MoneyHash, and Chad’s reputation as a value add investor makes him a force to be reckoned with. We go into Chad’s thinking on fintech, and his emerging market investment thesis.