What We Do
+VC is a venture capital firm focused on investing in tech and tech-enabled startups across the MENA region and its diaspora, taking an early leadership role with founders to set them up for success. We invest our first check at the seed stage and can follow-on the best performing portfolio companies all the way through to Series A.
Our Experience
As fund managers covering the MENA region, we’ve been investing in the region since 2010. With over 200 transactions under our belt as a team, we know what works and what doesn’t. We’ve been the first money in, and we’ve seen companies through to exit. These collective experiences make us empathetic towards the founder’s journey and it’s why we say that we’re the ones that work for our founders, not the other way around.
Our Investment Thesis
Our investment strategy is quite unique, and for good measure, employing a two-pronged approach to balance investing early and often in the non-obvious emerging market entrepreneur. The first prong of our strategy involves targeting 100-120 initial investments for risk diversification, we invest an average size of $100k at the seed stage and our follow-on allocation can go up to $0.5m. Our initial fund allocation will be split 50% for initial investments and 50% for follow-ons depending on the final fund size.
We’ve developed an almost intuitive rubric whereby, we’re not only fast to make investment decisions, we use processes that enable us to move faster – because we know that closing a funding round quickly can mean life or death for a young startup company. While investing at high frequency and high volume may seem less serious to some, we know that our selection and due diligence processes are still more rigorous than most.
FAQs
We’re obsessed with building community with our founders, and helping you be a part of something bigger. Our team has worked together for 4 years now, and have invested in over 180 startups over the past 3 years with boots on the ground across 4 MENA countries.
Most of us have been in your shoes before and always make an effort to treat founders the way we would want to be treated. Aside from an investment, you’ll get a lot more out of us, including in-depth training on the subjects that matter most at your stage, and availability of dry powder to help take you to the next level. Unlike most regional funds, our roots stem from Silicon Valley and we have vast networks in the US and across the entire region, not just one country or another.
We typically invest around $200,000 at the seed stage, with follow on investments up to $1m in the next round up to Series A, in around 20% of our portfolio. We offer standardised, founder-friendly terms and legal docs, and do our best to help our startups raise their full rounds through introductions to our network. That’s the job of a lead investor.
But being a part of +VC is not just about the investment – we know that there is a level of skill and knowledge that only experienced practitioners can impart, and that these skills can immediately improve the trajectory of most startups. Every startup we invest in gets to participate in our +Growth curriculum, with lectures, one-to-one mentorship sessions and community engagement aimed to accelerate their growth and impart a growth mindset on the company. Our mentors are world class, people who have built startups themselves and speak from experience and practical expertise.
You’ll also be added to part of something bigger. Our +Community offers something more – with a big group of other founders in your sector and city – to network with, get and receive advice from, and just have other founders cheering you on during your successes and supporting you in the tough times. We also run an annual, invite only +Portfolio Summit, where we run workshops, community building activities, and invite investors and LPs from our network to attend.
If you’re a team in the MENA region or from the MENA region, obsessed with execution, and have launched a product with users or customer traction, we want to talk to you. Especially if you’re working on something different not yet seen in our region. We invest across sectors so long as technology is the product, means of distribution or business model. We’re looking for founders tackling real problems for large markets. We also have a bias towards those tackling the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs) and with an lense on non-financial factors of environment, social and governance (ESG).
There’s no single formula for success, but the ideal founding team would consist of 3 founders, the coder, the growth marketer and the subject matter expert. Of course, success comes in many forms, we simply feel this is the best combination for success and handling the multitude of functions and resources needed at the earliest stages.
We don’t invest in ideas or products alone – we want to see that you know how to acquire users or customers first, and ultimately, that the market is responding positively to your solution.