A number of fintech startups have found themselves adrift after Saudi Arabia’s latest crackdown on credit cards. Among them is Alaan, a Peak XV Partners and Y Combinator backed firm which closed a $48 million Series A round in August 2025.

Arabic online publication Arageek first reported the development in January, adding that Alaan had made a call to “exit” Saudi Arabia due to regulatory challenges, a claim the UAE-based startup has refuted saying it has put operations on pause instead. (See screengrabs below.)

Industry sources have told Kristie Neo’s Substack that this was linked to a crackdown by the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority (SAMA) on Neoleap, Alaan’s card issuing provider in Saudi Arabia. Neoleap is also a subsidiary of Al Rajhi Bank, one of the Kingdom’s largest banks by total assets.

Sometime in December 2025, SAMA was understood to have ordered Neoleap to suspend its BIN sponsorship programme for card issuance. This created a ripple effect on fintech startups like Alaan, Pemo and Pluto, which were tapping on Neoleap’s card issuing services to operate in the Kingdom.

It is not known what first triggered this crackdown, but according to one source with direct knowledge about Neoleap, the firm was not correctly licensed by SAMA as widely claimed. Neoleap’s CEO Abdullah Alibrahim has left the firm as of January 2026, according to his Linkedin profile.

SAMA has concurrently issued new regulations aimed at tightening credit card financing in Saudi Arabia. It issued a circular in December 2025 prohibiting the use of promissory notes in credit card financing.

“The Saudi Central Bank has cancelled the requirement for individual customers to provide promissory notes or any commercial paper when applying for credit card financing products, effective February 1, 2026, revealing that it had observed the recent spread of the phenomenon of individual customers obtaining promissory notes when applying for credit card financing products.

The Saudi Central Bank (SAMA) has instructed financing entities to cease requiring promissory notes or any other commercial paper from individual customers when offering credit card financing products. SAMA emphasized the need to update internal policies, procedures, and controls accordingly.

In a circular, SAMA directed financing entities to submit, within 30 days, a plan to rectify existing practices. This plan must include, at a minimum, the return or cancellation of any promissory notes or commercial paper previously obtained from individual customers that do not comply with this circular. The implementation of this plan must be completed within six months of the date of this circular.” (Source: Saudi Central Bank, SAMA)

Saudi Arabia’s fintech sector has grown rapidly since the launch of its ambitious Vision 2030 blueprint. A total of 261 fintech companies were operating in the Kingdom as of end 2024, with an aim to double this by 2030.

This has led to massive transformations in the way Saudi Arabians pay, save and invest in the country. 79% of individual retail purchases were conducted online in 2024 compared to 70% in 2023, according to SAMA.

The Saudi market is still widely underpenetrated when it comes to consumer credit and banking services. 38.5% of young Saudis do not have a savings bank account, while 41.2% do not own a credit card, according to a 2025 report by the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies.

This presents plenty of market entry opportunities for fintechs eager to capture a slice of what is still a greenfield market. Regulatory compliance however remains one of the key obstacles for fintechs looking to enter Saudi Arabia quickly.

No comments were received by SAMA, Neoleap, Alaan, Pemo and Pluto at the time of publishing this story.

This article first appeared on the Clearly Tech Substack on 19 January 2026. He writes frequently on data centres, AI, cybersecurity, cloud, enterprise IT and sustainability here.

In December, I wrote about two possible scenarios for the current data centre boom: a bubble that’s set to burst with catastrophic consequences, or the start of a supercycle unlike anything seen before. I noted how Asia will need more data centres in either scenario, which means the region will be somewhat insulated even in the worst case.

But as I rested during my year-end break and talked to industry leaders throughout December, I heard developments that incline me towards a supercycle scenario in Southeast Asia. On one hand, an Eastern hyperscale operator is doubling down with plans to build significantly more data centre capacity here. On the other, I’ve also had coffee with a senior executive of a large regional operator who admitted having more demand in their order books than they could fulfil.

That got me thinking. What would a sustained data centre boom in Southeast Asia look like? Unlike similar growth surges in Western markets, the markets here differ significantly from each other, with arious intricacies to consider across the region. With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at some hard truths behind Southeast Asia’s digital infrastructure race.

Growth has physical limits

Reading the headlines these days, one might think that data centres are sponging up every iota of our resources. The situation is more nuanced, and the best way to illustrate this is to look at Malaysia, which has experienced an unprecedented surge of data centre construction that could see it overtake every data centre market in Asia Pacific, other than China, in the next four years.

Let’s start with water. Recent government data shows that data centres in Selangor, Kuala Lumpur, and Putrajaya now consume 0.47 million litres (0.012% of total water use), while those in Johor consume 9.07 million litres (0.6% of the state’s total). So no, Malaysia’s data centres won’t trigger a drought by a long stretch. However, the surge in demand can certainly scramble carefully laid plans. Already, it has led to a water moratorium for data centre operators amid urgent work to divert surplus water to places that need it, as well as to complete the construction of new water treatment plants.

To cope, hyperscale operators there are building water treatment plants and wastewater treatment plants, such as the Bridge Data Centres Water Reclamation Plant, the very first data centre-operated facility of its kind in Southeast Asia. I had the opportunity to visit it, which you can read about here. Elsewhere, it was revealed that an upcoming Google data centre at Port Dickson will have a new water treatment plant with a capacity of 65 million litres per day, as well as an off-river storage facility for a “steady water supply.”

Power is another consideration. At the heart of data centres is access to power, which gives operators an advantage in negotiations. This has resulted in spurious or overly optimistic applications for electricity, which is a problem for power plants and government planners. To curb this, Malaysia has just announced that it will prevent speculative power applications for data centres by applying a penalty per kilowatt for unused capacity if they fail to utilize at least 85% of their requested power.

My point? Every market faces a hard ceiling. Whether it’s access to electricity and water in Malaysia, limited carbon footprint in Singapore, or investor confidence in other regions, they all serve to add friction even in the face of surging demand.

Location is defined by connectivity

Speaking of Singapore, the country had previously imposed a moratorium on new data centres before moving to a strategy of controlled growth. In December 2025, the DC-CFA2 was announced, which will offer at least 200MW of data centre capacity to an unspecified number of operators based on proposals to be submitted. Given the slower growth, how will Singapore maintain its hub position?

Turns out the geography works in its favour. Over the last decade, it has positioned itself as a literal hub for connectivity, with one of the highest numbers of subsea cable landings in the region. In a conversation with an industry veteran a year ago, I was told that Singapore has 10 times the international bandwidth of Malaysia at the time.

And Singapore has announced plans to double its capacity for cable landings over the next decade. The strategic importance comes into sharp relief when you consider its very limited shoreline amid the massive maritime traffic and sheer number of subsea cables already landing - 28 as of end-2025. So while data centres are typically built in locations with access to power and water, location matters insofar as access to subsea cables is concerned.

Construction is only the beginning

Just like data halls are more than just a safe room to place servers, modern data centres don’t exist in a vacuum. An entire ecosystem is required to make them work; even the largest hyperscale operator won’t be able to do everything alone.

For instance, there is the general contractor for the structural works, then the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP), and plant and equipment installation. This is followed by the deployment of control and monitoring systems, white space fit-out, and finally testing and commissioning. Each of these requires its own set of vendors and specialists.

And as rack density continues its inexorable increase, there is a need to deploy liquid cooling. Inexperience can cost dearly here, especially when you consider how a cooling leak in September last year damaged millions of dollars’ worth of GPUs. Finally, there is the trained and experienced manpower required to keep the data centre operational.

Whether we’re at the start of a supercycle or heading for a correction, the fundamentals remain the same. Data centres need water, power, connectivity, and an ecosystem of skilled people. Southeast Asia has room to grow, but the shape and speed of this growth are inextricably tied to each market’s ability to navigate the hard truths outlined above.

It’s been more than a year since the surprise departure of Dubai Future District Fund (DFDF)’s founding CEO, Sharif El-Badawi, and it appears the role is still vacant today.

Several sources aware of the development have told Kristie Neo’s Substack that DFDF has been struggling to find a replacement for El-Badawi, a high-profile hire with prior investment and founder experience in Silicon Valley.

According to one source, DFDF has already deployed about half of its initial committed AED 1 billion ($272.3 million) from its two sole limited partners (LPs) — Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) and the Dubai Future Foundation (DFF).

This means that the new leader will have to raise from external LPs based on the performance of previously deployed capital. This isn’t a strong enough incentive for an incoming general partner (GP), who might be more inclined to launch a fund independently on his or her own, opined the source.

Several industry stakeholders have also noted a significant slowdown in DFDF’s deal activity in recent times, apart from the occasional follow-on and co-investment cheques in startups.

There were several reasons cited for El-Badawi’s departure, a role he took on as founding CEO in 2021. Among them were strategic differences over the future direction of the fund and how it should be run.

A separate source shared that DFDF’s LPs wanted DFDF to veer into venture building, which El-Badawi disagreed with. Other sources also cited the political complications of having to juggle with two state-backed LPs with specific objectives and KPIs.

El-Badawi’s departure has since triggered an exodus of talent from the firm. Some notable exits include its managing director for investments, Amer Fatayer and legal counsel, Romy Abou Khalil.

DFDF is currently led by board members mainly comprising Dubai Future Foundation and DIFC representatives. Nader AlBastaki serves as managing director but is no longer listed as a member of DFDF’s investment committee.

DFDF was set up in 2021 with a mandate to boost startup, venture capital investing and business activity in Dubai and the region. According to its website, the evergreen fund-of-funds aims to provide a healthy return to investors while facilitating GDP growth, job creation and the next generation of industries and skills.

Since its inception, DFDF has deployed into 12 venture capital funds including Global Ventures, Beco Capital, Leo Capital, Arbor Ventures, Middle East Venture Partners, Nuwa Capital, Cotu Ventures, Outliers and Partech. It also has a portfolio of 16 startup investments including Camb.ai, Zywa, BYLD and Valeo Health.

Sharif El-Badawi declined to comment on this story.

DFDF has been reached for comment.

ICYMI:

• Saudi’s STV struggled to raise Fund II from external investors, sources say (Kristie Neo’s Substack)

• A detailed breakdown on Dubai’s Dubizzle (Kristie Neo’s Substack)

• In Oman, PE/VC is a cute little cottage industry (Kristie Neo’s Substack)

Editor’s note: A statement by B Capital confirming this development has been added to this story.

B Capital’s general partner Kabir Narang has left after more than 8 years at the global venture capital firm, Kristie Neo’s Substack has learnt.

Narang was part of B Capital’s founding team, alongside co-founders Raj Ganguly, Howard Morgan and Facebook co-founder, Eduardo Saverin. He served as the chair of B Capital’s global investment committee and co-led its Asia strategy out of Singapore.

B Capital has scaled tremendously since its inception in 2015. Today, the US and Singapore headquartered firm oversees over $9 billion in assets under management. It has a global portfolio of more than 200 companies across fund strategies spanning early to growth-stage technology, healthcare, climate, as well as a Middle East and South Asia (MESA) fund.

According to one source aware of the development, Narang is exploring setting up a new fund. Narang declined to provide details.

B Capital confirmed Narang’s departure in a statement.

“After more than eight years with the firm, Kabir Narang who focused on later stage growth investing efforts in Asia, has left his role to pursue other opportunities. We are grateful for his contributions, and we wish him continued success in the future,” wrote a B Capital spokesperson.

B Capital added that Eduardo Saverin, Karan Mohla and Howard Morgan will manage its Asia portfolio alongside its existing team in South and Southeast Asia.

Prior to B Capital, Narang was a partner at Eight Roads Ventures, Fidelity’s venture capital investment arm. He also had investing and consulting stints at Warburg Pincus, Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey and Co across the US, India and Singapore.

Other departures

Several high-profile exits have taken place lately as Southeast Asia and India’s VC industry continues to consolidate and find its footing.

Another recent departure was Peak XV’s partner Pieter Kemps (formerly Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia) who has left the VC firm to shift his focus back to Europe. Kemps had been with Peak XV Partners for over a decade and in Asia for 20 years.

Other departures at Peak XV Partners include Abheek Anand, Shailesh Lakhani and Harshjit Sethi.

Elsewhere, VC funds have either slowed down their deployments or are in the midst of consolidation.

Singapore state investor, Temasek Holdings, which is an investor in several private equity and venture capital funds in Asia, has taken steps to restructure and consolidate its sprawling funds portfolio.

Over the past year, it wound down Heliconia Capital and has also consolidated Pavilion Capital into Seviora Holdings under the leadership of former top civil servant Gabriel Lim.

In other cases, VCs have turned themselves into private equity shops by investing in traditional SMEs and are at times even doing majority buyouts of companies.

Other funds like Granite Asia (GGV) and Openspace Capital (formerly Openspace Ventures) have adopted multi-asset strategies in order to adapt to the market changes. Some of these new fund mandates include launching new asset classes like private credit and listed equities.

Saudi Telecom Ventures (STV), the venture arm of Saudi Telecom Company (STC), has been struggling to raise its second fund despite years of active fundraising, sources say.

The Riyadh-based venture capital firm was last reported by Bloomberg to have targeted $1 billion for Fund II back in 2021. At the time, STV had initiated conversations with Middle East sovereign wealth funds, as well as international pension funds and endowments.

Since then, STV’s total capital under management increased to $800 million from $500 million during its 2017 inception. The additional $300 million was a top up made by its sole and anchor LP, Saudi Telecom in 2022.

According to one source close to the development, STV secured commitments from Saudi Venture Capital Company (SVC) and Jada Fund of Funds for Fund II. It was aiming to raise from external LPs but struggled to do so, due to a mix of reasons including fund size and weak fund compliance and reporting structures.

STV’s $800 million fund size means that it tends to get benchmarked against large institutional funds in developed markets, but lacks the internal structures required to keep a fund of this size operational by global standards, added the source.

A second source told Kristie Neo’s Substack that STV has been steadily reducing its fund target over the years for Fund II from $1 billion, to $500 million and now $300 million.

The relationship between STV’s founder Abdulrahman Tarabzouni and its sole LP, Saudi Telecom hasn’t been smooth sailing as well, leading to a reluctance from Saudi Telecom to commit capital to STV again, added the source.

This has been mirrored by rising activity at Tali Ventures, another “corporate venture arm of STC” launched in 2024 with committed capital of $300 million. Earlier this year, Tali Ventures invested in Tarmeez Capital, a Saudi private debt firm with ambitions to originate debt transactions in the Saudi kingdom.

A third source close to STV explained that the Saudi VC has undergone a strategy pivot where it is evolving into a multi-strategy fund.

Since the start of 2025, STV has launched two smaller fund strategies — a $100 million AI-focused fund backed by Google, and another $100 million venture debt fund (STV NICE Fund I) backed by SAB Invest and NTDP.

This approach of raising capital for smaller specialist funds is understood to be more effective for the Saudi VC.

The same source shared that STV is currently audited by two different sets of auditors — one from Cayman and STC’s own auditors. A globally prominent LP advisory also currently does due diligence and oversees STV’s reporting, added the person who declined to be named.

According to STV’s website, the Saudi VC has invested in over 30 companies including Tabby, Noon, Foodics, Qlub and Calo. It has also listed the likes of Careem, Opontia, Tweeq and SpiderSilk among its exits.

STV and STC have been reached for comment.

Most Middle East PE and VC fund managers have historically depended on sovereign funds and local investors for fundraising. But as the ecosystem continues to mature, many of these GPs are looking to diversify their LP base as a way to internationalise and scale.

Over the past year, several MENA GPs have travelled to Europe, Hong Kong and Singapore to raise capital. However several fundraising hurdles still remain for MENA fund managers, with LPs citing the lack of track record and small market size among the reasons for their reluctance to invest.

ICYMI:

• What the numbers tell us about Saudi Arabia’s Impact46 (Kristie Neo’s Substack)

• Gulf venture capitalists keep a close watch as Trump tariffs bite (Kristie Neo’s Substack)

• A detailed breakdown on Dubai’s Dubizzle (Kristie Neo’s Substack)

First up, I must thank G for heeding my public call for Dubizzle’s IPO prospectus, which forms the backbone of today’s little dig <3

Who is Dubizzle?

• Dubizzle is counted among MENA’s largest classifieds plays backed by Prosus/OLX Group, Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners, KCK Group, Acaia Partners and others

• It lists a total of 6 brands across general, property and car classifieds — Dubizzle, Bayut, Property Monitor, Drive Arabia, Hatla2ee, Sectorlabs, DubizzleLabs. It is operational in 8 countries: UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan, Kuwait.

• Competitors: PropertyFinder (UAE), Dubicars (UAE), Yallamotor (UAE), Aqar (KSA)

• Dubizzle scrapped its highly-anticipated Dubai IPO on Oct 22, one day before book building began, presumably due to market conditions.

• Several major IPOs have performed poorer than expected this year, including Delivery Hero’s Talabat and LuLu’s Retail. Others have gone ahead to postpone their IPOs including Etihad Airways and Masdar Developments.

• That hasn’t stopped UAE real estate firms from throwing their hats into the IPO ring — Binghatti and Dubai Investment PJSC (spinoff) have so far reported interest to publicly list. Let’s see if they go past the finish line…

What does Dubizzle’s IPO prospectus show?

1. Dubizzle is loss-making, needs to expand, but may be reluctant to spend the cash

Dubizzle Group (formerly EMPG) was founded as Zameen in 2006 and has scaled quickly since. But over it nearly 20 years of operations, it seems like the firm hasn’t managed to turn a profit. (See below.)

It narrowly squeezed in an operating profit of $963,000 in 1H2025 versus a $12.1 million operating loss in 2024, presumably in the run-up to its recent IPO listing.

They’ve attributed the longstanding losses to share-based payment expenses (ESOPs) and other “non-routine, non-operational” items.

It’s quite evident that Dubizzle’s revenues, which primarily come from annual contracts with UAE real estate/car agents and customers, has flattened somewhat in the last few years.

Since 2022, Dubizzle has consistently generated about $190-220 million in contracts each year. The firm’s biggest expenses come from salaries — $60-88 million annually, which effectively eat up anywhere between 27-46% of these sales.

There’s plenty of extra accounting for adjusted profit/loss and revenue after discounting non-routine items etc which comes across as pure embellishment and therefore isn’t worth dwelling on.

I can see why Dubizzle needed this IPO.

The Dubai firm has $160.1 million of cash in the bank, but continues to rack up operating losses of $60.1 million each year, of which ~91% of it came from share-based payments (employee shares) alone.

Since its landmark merger with OLX in 2020, the firm has inherited OLX’s subsidiaries in Pakistan, Egypt, UAE and Lebanon while enjoying a fresh $150 million cash injection from the Prosus giant.

It sold off its pre-OLX merger Southeast Asian assets (ie: Lamudi) around 2021-22, then followed up with 3 MENA acquisitions in 2023-24 (ie: Drive Arabia, Hatla2ee and Property Monitor) to consolidate its position as a full-fledged regional play.

While all that is happening, Dubizzle’s revenues are still heavily dependent on the UAE with 89% of its 1H2025 adjusted revenues coming from the Emirates alone.

In sum, this is Dubizzle’s current position:

• Still racking up operating losses, but mostly in the form of employee shares. They need to get this off the books

• Need extra ammunition to expand into new markets so they can keep growing and diversify revenues beyond UAE

• Good news: There is some cash in the bank and an okay runway

• Bad news: It’s not fuckyou money. Still bleeding money every year

What do you do? You can:

• Do an IPO to raise capital for all of the above

• Go back to OLX and raise again but risk further dilution

• Grab a knife and start slashing cashburn. Layoffs?

Now with Dubizzle’s IPO postponed, they may do a wait and see. If nothing changes, they may raise a bridge round? Borrow? Leverage some capital off their revenues in the interim and hopefully list in 2026-27?

All Kristie Neo’s personal speculations ✌🏼

2. Dubizzle was last priced at a valuation of $1.4 billion

According to Dubizzle’s IPO prospectus, the classifieds last priced round appears to be Series C — not Series E as reported by media — led by Affinity Partners in 2022.

I’ve done a pretty simple calculation based on the tables below:

Dubizzle has done something quite interesting with its captable.

Unlike most startups where ordinary shares are issued to founders/early employees, and preference shares are issued to PE/VC investors in a “stack” with varying preferences and rights, Dubizzle has issued preferred ordinary shares across the board. As the name suggests, preferred ordinary shares are a blend of both share classes.

What it means: All Dubizzle shareholders (regardless of stage/round) hold in ordinary shares but enjoy certain preferential rights (ie: dividends or liquidation). They also convert to common ordinary shares upon IPO to ensure one listed class.

As of 2023, Dubizzle had 21,433 preferred ordinary shares issued (table above). Its Series C share price was $65.43 (table below).

So 21,433,000 shares x $65.43 = US$1.4 billion (as of 2023)

According to Bloomberg, Dubizzle was aiming to raise on Dubai Financial Markets (DFM) at a $2 billion valuation, representing a pretty meaningful 42.8% jump from its last round.

We all know that Dubizzle pulled the plug on that IPO in the end, so I guess the team wasn’t confident that public markets could fetch the price they wanted.

3. Dubizzle vs PropertyFinder

Perhaps one of the less explored topics is the so-called underground rivalry between Dubizzle and PropertyFinder. Both firms were racing to raise capital around the same time earlier this year — one in public markets (Dubizzle), the other in private (PropertyFinder).

Dubizzle Ltd., which operates classifieds websites popular with expatriates, is set to meet investors ahead of a potential initial public offering, according to people familiar with the matter. Competing online portal Property Finder has also been sounding out equity investors on a so-called “non-deal roadshow,” some of the people said, declining to be identified as the information is private. (Source: Bloomberg)

PropertyFinder ended up announcing yet another hefty round the same week Dubizzle pulled the plug on its IPO. The pace and size of these rounds are pretty mind boggling:

• May 2024: PropertyFinder buys back BECO Capital’s share. BECO fully exits. Funded via $90m debt by Francisco Partners

• September 2025: Permira and Blackstone invests $525m minority stake. Also involved partial secondary by General Atlantic. Said to be valued at $2b

• October 2025: Ares Management invests $250 million debt round

There aren’t any clear revenue numbers in the public domain so it’s quite difficult to make sense of PropertyFinder’s true size and growth.

But two UAE real estate folks I’ve spoken with told me that while Dubizzle’s Bayut (property listing brand) has long been a laggard, they’ve made major improvements in the last 2 years especially in the quality and accuracy of their listings.

“Many agents prefer Bayut over PropertyFinder at the moment, which didn’t use to be the case. They say that Bayut leads are better and they’re enjoying higher perceived ROI when it comes to conversion,” said one Dubai-based founder in the real estate industry.

In April 2025, Dubizzle’s acquired Property Monitor, a SaaS platform offering property data, pricing intelligence and automated valuations, which further underscores their intentions to drive better quality listings and agent experience.

As Dubizzle continues to hone in on the MENA market, I’m sure we can expect more (friendly?) friction and competition between both firms (PropertyFinder is also a regional play).

I would also be curious to see what both firms will eventually do in the area of property finance, which would be very natural expansion territory for both.

PropertyFinder currently operates a mortgage aggregation site, but doesn’t disburse loans. Dubizzle isn’t in property finance at all. Given that both are holding over nearly two decades worth of data, there will be plenty of opportunities to monetise on their datasets and create new revenue streams from there.

Something to watch out for I guess!

4. Dubizzle’s shareholders and board

Dubizzle’s biggest shareholder is Prosus via OLX (37.95%), followed by KCK Ventures Fund III (14.02%), Kingsway Frontier Consumer Internet (FCI) Fund L.P (11.01%) and Affinity Partners Parallel Fund I LP (10.59%). Collectively these 4 investors make up 73.57% of the captable pre-offering.

The above screengrab shows the proposed board for Dubizzle’s IPO. All are existing board directors at Dubizzle with the exception of Jake Hennemuth and Ali Esfahani who were meant to join as board directors upon IPO.

Since the listing did not take place, they are not board directors at Dubizzle today.

Dubizzle has been reached for comment.

Spenmo’s former CEO-founder, Mohandass Kalaichelvan, has started a new AI company and raised money for it, Kristie Neo’s Substack has learnt.

According to one source, Kalaichelvan is understood to have either raised or borrowed at least $2 million for Veridian, an agentic finance operations service focused on the hotel industry. A separate source said that the capital likely came from Kalaichelvan’s friends and family.

Veridian’s Acra filings do not show any new preference shares issued. However it lists Kalaichelvan and another fellow ex-Spenmo executive Hans Ivander, as directors and shareholders of the firm. Veridian was founded in 2023.

According to its official website, Veridian conducts automatic billing and reconciles accounts receivables to help hoteliers prevent revenue leakage, reduce manual processes and provide full audit transparency of its books.

It listed Tune Hotels, Ormond The Chow Kit, Momo’s Kuala Lumpur and Millennium Hotels and Resorts among its clientele. (See screengrab below.)

Mohandass Kalaichelvan resigned from Spenmo in 2023 following an investigative report by DealStreetAsia about risk and compliance issues at the Singaporean spend management startup.

The expose detailed several issues including the commingling of customer and corporate funds, little documentation of corporate expenses and “disappearing” monies. The incident triggered an intervention by Spenmo’s investors, leading to a leadership and structural overhaul. Spenmo has since rebranded itself to Summit.

Spenmo rose to prominence at the peak of Southeast Asia’s venture scene, culminating in a hefty $85.5 million Series B round led by Tiger Global and joined by Insight Partners, Rocket Internet, Lee Fixel’s Addition, Global Founders Capital, Alpha JWC Ventures and Salesforce Ventures in 2022. The firm was valued at $500 million post-money at the time.

Veridian has been reached for comment. No response was received at the time of publishing this story.

Temasek Holdings will be taking a hard look in the mirror as it conducts one of the largest strategic overhauls in its 51-year history. Last week, the Singapore state investor announced a restructuring that will split it into 3 entities. A leadership shuffle aims to usher Temasek into its next chapter.

There are several outstanding issues. For one, the fate of many funds hangs in the balance.

Over the past decade, Temasek’s funds and asset management bucket, which alone accounts for 20% of its $324 billion global portfolio, has multiplied into a dizzying array of funds across stage, size and theme. This has led to overlaps across mandate and scope, resulting in confusing and often counterproductive clashes between Temasek’s “family” of funds.

Several sources have hinted that consolidations may be in order, including Temasek’s sustainability-focused funds like ABC Impact and GenZero which may go under Seviora Holdings. Vertex Holdings is also understood to have been previously considered for consolidation.

Heliconia Capital, a 15-year old Temasek fund managing $1.7 billion in assets has already been consolidated under 65 Equity Partners (65EP), involving the exit of its CEO Derek Lau earlier this year.

Any move to consolidate these multi-billion dollar entities will not be quick or straightforward. The types of fund vehicles, the licenses they have, the assets they control, and how much external capital they manage, will all influence the shape and speed of these deals.

Bringing Heliconia under 65EP’s fold may appear to be a “simple” transaction involving two 100% Temasek-owned entities, but was still a complicated and lengthy process, as first reported by Kristie Neo’s Substack. It further underscores the complexities at hand as Temasek and Seviora begin their strategic review.

Other funds face other types of issues. Pavilion Capital and Vertex Holdings bear questions around leadership continuity as their respective CEOs Tow Heng Tan and Chua Kee Lock approach retirement age and no clear successors in sight.

65 Equity Partners (65EP) appears to be experiencing a slight identity crisis.

Originally set up in 2021 as Singapore’s answer to its glaring lack of local IPO listings, the investment giant has since amassed $3.3 billion worth in assets, and still no portfolio firms slated for an SGX listing.

Since then, Singapore has announced another round of cash injections under the S$5 billion Equity Market Development Programme aimed at boosting liquidity on the SGX. The move was widely lauded in the press, but many industry stakeholders remain skeptical.

The crucial question for Temasek today isn’t simply about driving organisational simplicity and alignment. That’s the baseline. It is about Temasek’s willingness to dramatically reinvent itself.

Temasek has scaled itself with tremendous success over the past 50 years. But in recent times, its reputation has been blighted by a number of embarrassing investments such as eFishery, FTX and Zilingo. This has raised questions in the industry about the level of accountability for its portfolio blips.

Will Temasek have the gumption to fully open the books? How far will they go to unearth and overhaul outdated approaches and KPIs? Are they willing to cull managers on the basis of performance?

These are all questions that Singapore’s investor community will be following closely for answers in the coming months. Because if Singapore wants to reinvent itself for the future, it cannot continue the way it was.

Cracking difficult problems never came from doing the same thing twice.

“Temasek Partnership Solutions (TPS) will work together with the Seviora board and CEO, Gabriel Lim, to undertake a strategic review of existing asset management companies and explore growing new ones. The objective is to build on existing strengths to synergise networks, capabilities, and operations for future growth and scale,” wrote Temasek in an email to Kristie Neo’s Substack.

No response was received from Seviora at the time of publishing this story.

This article first appeared on Robin Hick’s Boiling Frog Substack on 17 July 2025. He writes frequently on sustainability and business in Asia here.

A real estate developer in Singapore has secured a green loan to build a property on newly deforested land.

The S$692 (US$540 million) green loan, announced in Business Times last month, has been issued to finance a “nature-aligned” residential project in Tengah, Singapore’s newest housing estate, which until very recently was covered by secondary forest.

The mixed-use property will, according to a press release from anchor lender DBS Bank, be built using biodiversity-friendly design, native landscaping, green infrastructure and integrate nature into the project.

The loan will fund part of Singapore’s first eco-friendly and car-lite “forest” town that focuses on “sustainable living”, a consortium comprising real estate firms Hong Leong Holdings, GuocoLand Limited and CSC Land Group said in a statement.

The project aims to “demonstrate how private-sector partnerships and sustainable finance can bring national climate and liveability goals to life – contributing to creating urban spaces that are smart, resilient and in harmony with the natural environment.”

However, a reader of the story in Business Times said the loan was a “clear case” of greenwashing.

In an email to flag the development, the reader initialed TA noted that the “nature-centric” property involves the clearing of secondary forest in Tengah, which has been documented to host lots of native flora and fauna.

Though these forests have grown over what was a century or more ago plantations or kampung [village] land, they host a high diversity of wildlife. Critically endangered leopard cats and Sunda pangolins have been recorded there.

“There is little that is “eco-friendly” about replacing regenerating forests with concrete, regardless of how many green walls or rooftop gardens are included in the design [of the property],” wrote TA.

“These misleading labels risk diluting the integrity of sustainability terms and set a dangerous precedent for what passes as “green”, or worse, "nature-positive", a term that is increasingly becoming popular.”

So, how did this qualify as a green loan?

DBS won’t reveal exactly how the loan was structured.

Which is a bit of a red flag.

According to the press release, the green loan was issued according to Green Loan Principles, a set of guidelines published by industry body the Loan Market Association in 2018, when the green loans market was taking off.

The Green Loan Principles include four key elements. The first is that the loaned project should offer clear, verifiable environmental benefits, which must be concrete, quantifiable, measured, and reported by the borrower.

DBS press release makes no mention of the forest that was lost to build the property at Tengah Garden Avenue, nor does it explain how cutting down this forest is environmentally beneficial.

It also makes no mention of targets or ecological assessments, which are an essential condition of the Green Loan Principles.

According to sources familiar with the deal, the loan qualified as a green loan because it complies with Singapore’s green building code, known as the Green Mark scheme.

This presumes that a building constructed according to green building principles, with “biodiversity-enhancing design” and “restorative landscapes”, compensates for the loss of the forest it was built on.

The Tengah case also raises questions about the purpose of green loans.

What are they for – other than to get cheap money from a bank and some nice PR?

Recent cases of questionable sustainability-related loans suggest that saving the planet was not a high priority when the loans were pieced together.

Japanese megabank MUFG was shot down in April for lending millions in sustainability-linked loans to Singapore-based palm oil and paper company RGE, after satellite analysis found deforestation in its concessions.

A loan for building a building on flattened forest in Singapore is worthy of scrutiny for similar reasons.

Late last year, Rabobank, a Dutch lender that has relatively solid eco cred, issued a sustainability-linked loan to palm oil company Musim Mas Group without clarifying who would verify the firm’s sustainability performance before the loan was signed off.

The market for sustainability-related loans – a green loan is a more environmentally focused than a sustainability-linked loan – is ripe for a shake-down.

Banks tend to use their own definitions for what constitutes a green loan, and how the impact of that loan should be measured and monitored, according to experts Boiling Frog spoke to for this piece.

“Banks will say they ticked the box. But they become more relaxed when the project is underway – and no one is monitoring progress,” a source told Boiling Frog.

At the moment, too many green loans fall short on a very basic pre-condition: do no harm.

They are also lacking solid metrics to back up their claims.

Without them, they are greenwashing.

A green loan for a property built on deforested land is as ridiculous as it sounds.

Temasek’s Heliconia Capital is in the process of being consolidated under another Temasek-backed asset management firm, 65 Equity Partners (65EP), according to several sources.

65EP is a global investment firm investing in family-owned and mid-market businesses across Southeast Asia, Europe and the United States. It is also a limited partner (LP) in at least 3 funds — Novo Tellus, Tower Capital Asia and FSI Fund I — and oversees a total of $3.5 billion (S$4.5 billion).

Heliconia’s consolidation follows the departure of its CEO Derek Lau in March this year. Lau was a former managing director at Temasek and led Heliconia for over a decade, spearheading the firm’s investment focus in Asian SMEs.

According to one source aware of the development, Heliconia’s consolidation was understood to be complex due to a mix of technical and personal issues. One of the hurdles cited was 65EP’s lack of a capital markets service (CMS) license – a prerequisite for managing funds from external investors.

According to 65EP’s official website, Heliconia Capital is a $1.7 billion fund.

The Temasek subsidiary had previously received $311 million (S$400 million) across two tranches from the Singapore government – once in 2010 and another in 2014 – under a scheme aimed at “catalysing” capital flows into SMEs, startups and private equity/venture capital funds.

It had amassed over $780 million (S$1 billion) in assets under management by 2019, across a range of direct, mezzanine and fund investments. Some of its well-known Asian portfolio companies include Razer, SecretLab, Carousell, ONE Championship, Lucence Diagnostics, Eagle Eye Centre and Sanli Environmental.

The move to consolidate Heliconia has been underway for at least 1-2 years, added the source. A separate public filing further shows that Heliconia was already declared under an entity called 65EP Investment I in 2023. (See below.)

65 Equity Partners was itself announced by Temasek four years ago in 2021.

A number of new directors were appointed to Heliconia last month, as seen on Singapore’s Acra. They are Chia Jie Hui (listed as CEO), Adrienne Teh and Wong Li Woei. Adrienne Teh is the head of portfolio and risk management at 65 Equity Partners.

What’s the background?

Heliconia’s consolidation takes place against a leadership refresh taking place at Temasek Holdings.

Since the start of 2024, four new Temasek board appointments have been made — Tan Chong Meng, Geoffrey Wong, Jim Hagemann Snabe and Ong Pang Thye. Other senior appointments include Eng Aik Meng, Dinesh Khanna (joint heads of portfolio development group), and Gabriel Lim (joint head of corporate strategy) were all announced in the last year.

The Singapore state investor has also been making adjustments to its private market strategy.

Temasek’s public assets overtook privates to take a larger share of Temasek’s $337.4 billion (S$434 billion) portfolio for the first time this year since 2021. It has also aggressively divested its assets, disposing of a record $33 billion (S$42 billion) in holdings over the past year, reported Bloomberg.

More notably, Temasek has cut back its exposure to early-stage investments, having gotten itself burnt by several high-profile corporate scandals including Zilingo, FTX and eFishery.

The leadership shuffle may have prompted a review of Temasek’s longstanding investments, including that of Heliconia Capital, which has been active for more than a decade.

Temasek is an LP in many well-known Asian funds including Seviora Group, 65 Equity Partners, Pavilion Capital, Vertex Holdings and others.

It played a key role as an active LP in many of the region’s first PE and VC funds, giving them a headstart at a time when the region’s private capital ecosystem was still in its infancy.

No response was received by Heliconia Capital and 65 Equity Partners at the time of publishing this story.

M&As are still a rare occurrence in the GCC, especially when it involves tech unicorns. So when news of Jahez’s acquisition of Qatar’s Snoonu came up, I figured it might be worth a dig.

To begin with, we are seeing a number of cross-border + cross-vertical M&As across the GCC, as recently mentioned in my last newsletter.

But in Jahez-Snoonu’s case, it’s also happening against the backdrop of rising competition in GCC’s e-commerce and food delivery market, notably driven by Meituan’s Keeta.

The Chinese food delivery player has grand ambitions to expand across Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and potentially Egypt and the UAE. Its entry into Brazil is already imminent.

Here are my key takeaways:

1. Qatar’s Snoonu is showing pretty phenomenal growth 📈

Snoonu is the most dominant food delivery and e-commerce player in Qatar today, with a super majority (85-90%) of its GMV coming from food delivery alone, according to Redseer estimates.

On the map, Qatar looks miniscule when compared to its Gulf cousins (population size ~3 million) but it actually enjoys one of the largest per capita disposable incomes in the GCC, which indicates high purchasing power.

This naturally leads to larger basket sizes in Qatar which seems to have benefited Snoonu’s toplines even though the company was launched recently in 2019. Food delivery penetration in Qatar (30%) is also higher than Saudi Arabia and UAE, indicating higher maturity when it comes to customer adoption, said Redseer.

Snoonu has shown pretty phenomenal growth in the last few years.

• Snoonu’s revenues:

  2022: QAR 146 million / US$40 million

  2023: QAR 255 million / US$69.92 million (+74.6% yoy)

  2024: QAR 511 million / US$140.12 million (+100.3% yoy)

• Snoonu’s net profit:

  2022: QAR -18 million / -US$5 million (net loss)

  2023: QAR 16 million / US$4.4 million (+188.8% yoy)

  2024: QAR 27 million / US$7.4 million (+68.8% yoy)

A Qatar-based contact of mine told me that Snoonu usually charges a flat delivery fee of QAR 10 (US$2.74), has spent almost zero on discounting, and yet has been EBITDA positive for nearly 2 years running.

There may be a couple of reasons for such strong performance, including the fact that Qatar is a small country which enjoys pretty robust infrastructure and road systems.

If you tie that (small delivery area radius) with a large average basket size, it suddenly makes Doha a good place to scale and monetise a business very quickly, shared Chada El Islam Benmahcene, CEO of ENTROGX Ventures on the VC React podcast.

The buyout also raises Jahez’s share of the GCC food aggregator market to 17% from 14% according to Redseer, solidifying its position against Delivery Hero’s Talabat and Hunger Station, Meituan’s Keeta, and a growing number of quick commerce players like Ninja and PIF-backed Noon.

2. Snoonu’s investors pocket sweet returns 🍭

Snoonu doesn’t seem to have raised a ton of money.

It raised $5 million in 2021 led by Qatar Development Bank (QDB), raised another $12 million in 2023 with QDB again leading the round. That’s it. So publicly at least, it’s raised no more than $20 million since its inception in 2019.

According to Jahez’s Tadawul filing, the other investors on Snoonu’s captable include:

• Saud Al Attiyah (Deputy Undersecretary, Ministry of Finance, Qatar);

• Abdulaziz Al Attiyah (Member, Shura Council of the State of Qatar);

• Snoonu’s founder, Hamad Mubarak Al Hajri (who was himself formerly the Director of Economic Competitiveness, Ministry of Finance, Qatar);

• and what looks like an SPV called Yellow Services W.L.L.

A Qatari contact of mine told me there were some ~100 local angels in an SPV in Snoonu, which must make for very fun times for their legal and accounting teams, but what do you care when Jahez bought everyone out…

Immediately after completion of the Transaction, Jahez will own 76.56% of Snoonu’s share capital and the founder of Snoonu, Mr. Hamad Mubarak Al Hajri, will own the remaining 23.44%. (Source: Tadawul Group)

And this 👇🏼

Pursuant to the terms of the SPSA, the consideration for the Transaction will consist of the following:

(a) in connection with the purchase of the Existing Shares, Jahez will:

1- pay to all existing Snoonu shareholders a cash consideration of USD 214 million (SAR 802 million). (Source: Tadawul Group)

So $214 million / $20 million = a roughly 10x return in 6 years. *kristie faints*

Snoonu was acquired at a post-money valuation of QAR 1.165 billion (USD $320 million), which gives it a revenue-to-valuation multiple of 2.2x.

3. Merger dynamics and Keeta’s impending Qatari entry

Snoonu is expected to keep its brand intact in Qatar. There aren’t any indications if the merger will lead to a ton of function overlaps and layoffs (yet), but it’s a situation which happens very often when an M&A occurs.

Mergers also look good on paper but tend to be very messy affairs when executed.

We’ve seen this plenty of times in Southeast Asia across stage and size, where post-merger integration end up becoming very lengthy and costly endeavors.

Other times, acquihires end up with entire teams ditching the company, eventually leaving the original acquirer with nothing. (Not quite the case in US AI these days but that’s a very, very different story LOL)

What’s quite different in this Jahez-Snoonu merger is that Snoonu’s founder is a former Qatari government official (see shareholder list above) — not quite the typical rags-to-riches / self-made entrepreneur story that one would expect. Obviously, this may alter motivations a little.

It also says a lot about the current state of Qatar’s startup market and talent pool ie: it’s still very much still a top-down ecosystem.

But more crucially to follow is Keeta’s impending entry into Qatar.

The Chinese food delivery player made an open call to Qatari F&B merchants and retailers to enrol on their platform just earlier this month.

A separate Doha-based contact of mine believes there’s still some way to go before Keeta is fully operational. While Keeta has licensed itself as an entity in Qatar, it still needs to apply for permits to run delivery fleets, onboard them etc.

Nevertheless, their entry into Qatar will be interesting to watch as they try to wrest market share away from Jahez’s Snoonu.

It’s been a busy week for ONE Championship. On Monday (June 30), the Asian mixed martial arts (MMA) unicorn made a public announcement which raised a few curious eyebrows.

ONE Championship will officially shift its global production operations from Singapore to Bangkok, citing “increased output, logistical efficiency and growing scale of its weekly ONE Friday Fights”. Its investor relations, strategic planning and senior leadership team will continue to be housed in Singapore.

ONE’s co-founder and CEO, Chatri Sityodtong called it “a step forward” for the sports media property, revealing that its overall revenue for 2025 is approaching $200 million, up from $148 million last year.

But ONE’s 2024 financials had not even been filed yet.

On that very same day, ONE Championship quietly submitted a letter to Singapore’s Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (Acra), requesting for a 60 day extension to file its numbers for 2024.

“The reason for this application is that our auditors require additional time to complete the audit due to resource constraints,” wrote Cai Yi Jin, also known as Jesley Chua, who serves as ONE’s director and chief financial officer.

Ernst & Young has been ONE’s auditor for many years.

Cai counter-proposed that ONE will hold its annual general meeting (AGM) no later than 29 August 2025 and file its annual return by 29 September 2025.

This is not the first time that ONE has generously rattled off its numbers in this way. If anything, it was meticulously timed.

Within 24 hours of that press release, a stream of personal announcements by various staff members at ONE began to make its way into the public domain. Layoffs were happening.

It is not known exactly how many people were affected, but sources have shared that cuts were made globally in marketing, editorial and PR teams in Singapore, the US, the Philippines and the UK.

This is not ONE’s first wave of layoffs. In fact, the Singapore-headquartered company has been steadily slashing headcount since the COVID pandemic in 2020, which struck its live events business and forced major delays on its US expansion plans.

Even though ONE managed to secure blue chip investors like Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) and Guggenheim Investments in December 2021, that $150 million fundraise eventually turned out to be its last major equity raise for a long time.

A curious news leak to Bloomberg last October stated that ONE raised an additional $50 million from QIA, but the firm’s latest filings suggest that it may not be a completely new round at all.

Beneath the surface, ONE was already trying to massage its mounting losses while executing on its grand ambitions to take on the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) in the US and globally.

Their latest FY2023 report reveals a number of noteworthy developments.

1. ONE Championship is consolidating/striking off some of its entities and moving them to its Cayman entity, “Group One Holdings (Cayman) Limited”

This includes: i) ONE’s employee share option plans; ii) Equity stakes in ONE China Pte Ltd, ONE Championship, Inc (US entity) and ONE Championship Ltd (Thai entity); Dentsu Group’s 19.89% minority stake in ONE Esports which was disposed in October 2024.

This also involves the movement of related transactions with these same entities to the Cayman.

One key transaction was a FY2020 transaction made with its US entity, ONE Championship, Inc, where ONE sold its IP rights for a consideration of $400 million to itself. $200 million of it was settled in shares, while the other $200 million was settled in cash. (See below.)

In the latest FY2023 statement, $200 million from this same transaction appears to have been in the form of an promissory note or an IOU with all rights, title and interest related to it transferred to the Cayman entity in FY2023 (see below.)

ONE’s latest $50.5 million round raised in October 2024 involves ordinary shares, which were also issued to the Cayman entity. Ordinary shares are usually issued to early employees and convertible note holders, while preference shares tend to be issued to investors at a new capital raise.

2. Saurabh Mittal’s Mission Holdings is the ultimate holding company of ONE Championship?

Mission Holdings is an investment firm owned and run by Singapore-based Indian billionaire Saurabh Mittal, a co-founder of Indiabulls, a financial services and property conglomerate in India.

His investment firm, Mission Holdings is one of ONE’s earliest and largest shareholders, where Mittal continues to retain a board seat.

Other board members include Peak XV Partners’s managing partner, Shailendra Singh; QIA’s Abdulla Ali Al-Kuwari; and ONE’s Chatri Sityodtong and Teh Hua Fung.

According to ONE’s FY2023 statement, Mission Holdings Ltd became ONE’s immediate and ultimate holding company in 1 January 2022. A few months later in May 2022, Group One Holdings (Cayman) Limited was formed, making it ONE’s immediate holding company.

However the statement says that Mission Holdings remains the “ultimate holding company”, which hints at Mission’s continued close involvement and oversight at ONE Championship and its Cayman entity set up. (See below.)

3. ONE Championship was loss-making in FY2023

To set the scene, 2023 was a key year for ONE Championship.

This was the year ONE was making an aggressive push into North America, with its first US live event headlined by Demetrious Johnson vs. Adriano Moraes in Broomfield, Colorado (May 5).

ONE’s partnership with Amazon Prime also began that year, with ONE’s Prime Video Fight Nights streaming into North America’s primetime slots.

In Asia, ONE was ramping up the frequency of its fights with its weekly ONE Friday Fights in Lumpinee Bangkok.

Let’s take a look at some of the numbers.

ONE’s FY2023 figures:

• Loss for the year: -$90 million (Losses up 46% on-year)

• Revenue: $68 million (Grew 25.1% on-year)

• Biggest expense came from marketing: $59.6 million

• Second biggest expense was employees: $21.5 million

• Net cash loss from operating activities: -$61.7 million

• Cash and cash equivalents: $21.7 million

ONE’s revenue breakdown:

The bulk of ONE’s revenues continued to come from broadcasters (ie: Amazon Prime and others) which grew by roughly 50% to $56.2 million in FY2023. But even though ONE organised more events in 2023, ticketing revenue slipped that year to $144,000 from $775,000 the year before. (See below.)

ONE continues to recognise both cash and non-cash components for its broadcast and sponsorship revenue.

Other losses:

But in addition to these losses on ONE’s balance sheet, the company has yet to offset another $418.4 million of “untilised tax losses” against future taxable income. (See below.)

In other words, ONE already lost $418 million prior — this is money which it has the option to pay back in the form of less taxes later down the line, when it eventually turns profitable.

It is not clear how these were accrued and why it is this large.

ONE Championship has raised about $536 million in share capital from investors like QIA, Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital India), Guggenheim Investments, Temasek Holdings, Heliconia Capital, Mission Holdings and others.

However the firm also generated $530.4 million in accumulated losses. (See below.)

ONE Championship has been reached for a comment.

What exactly is happening at ONE Championship? Quite a lot it seems…

Here’s a quick summary of recent events.

$50 million in new funding?

The Singapore-based mixed martial arts (MMA) sports media property was last reported to have raised $50 million from Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) and a group of investors last October.

The Bloomberg report added that ONE was priced at the same valuation as its last 2021 priced round of $1.35 billion, but the filings clearly show two things (see screenshot below):

• The Singapore registered entity issued shares to itself aka the parent entity in Cayman

• The shares were ordinary shares (not preference) priced at $1 each

It leads me to then wonder if these were simply previously-issued convertible notes which were turned into equity. Smart guesses anyone? 🤔

ONE Championship has raised over $550 million in funding to date, with a bevy of top investors including QIA, Temasek Holdings, Peak XV Partners (former Sequoia Capital India) and others.

Snubbed in Thailand? 😳

Thailand remains a key market for ONE Championship, where it runs the most number of MMA fight shows such as its ONE Friday Nights. It’s also a market where it enjoys consistently strong resonance because of its Muay Thai roots as well as its CEO’s Chatri Sityodtong’s half-Thai heritage.

However ONE’s standing in Thailand was thrown into a little uncertainty last week, with the Thai government approving a $1.2 billion deal to bring Formula One to Bangkok. The move appears to have created slight FOMO on the part of ONE, especially in a market where it’s recognised to enjoy strong ties with local authorities.

Sityodtong expressed his disappointment to Thai media last week, citing larger viewership and engagement than Formula One.

“To be honest, I feel a little sad. Boxing fans all over the country love ONE. 70 million Thais love ONE’s boxers. But why doesn’t the government support ONE Championship while other countries’ governments support it?

I am Thai. I made ONE Championship the number 1 martial arts program in the world. We help the country, inspire Thais, overcome obstacles, overcome poverty, and achieve success. ONE Championship is bigger than F1,” said Sityodtong as cited by Thai publication, Khaosod.

A response quickly followed, with Thailand’s Minister of Sports expressing a polite pledge of support.

"We admire what ONE Championship is doing," Minister of Tourism and Sports, Sorawong Thienthong said at a press conference on Wednesday, addressing growing scrutiny of the government's recent Formula One bid.

"Mr Chatri and ONE Championship play a crucial role in promoting Muay Thai. We're always willing to support ONE, because Muay Thai is something all Thai people want to see promoted on the global stage." (Source: Bangkok Post).

ONE’s Thai revenue and net losses jumped considerably in 2023, likely due to an aggressive rollout of 52 weekly fights at the prestigious Lumpinee Stadium in Bangkok from the beginning of that year. That promotion was made with the support of the Royal Thai Army (see below.)

Their Thai financials have also not escaped the eyes of MMA fans, who further pointed at the vast difference in ONE’s performance compared to its local Thai competitors.

The Rajadamnern World Series (RWS) reportedly outperformed ONE roughly 6:1 in terms of revenue in 2023. RWS was also profit-making while ONE netted losses of roughly US$8.8 million or 288 million Thai baht that same year (see below.)

Elsewhere in ONE’s other business lines, there appears to be some downsizing occurring. ONE eSports lost its department head, Carlos Alimurung among several other staff cuts last year. ONE’s affiliated gym, Evolve MMA is also understood to be shutting one of its key outlets at Far East Square in Singapore.

What about the US?

Entering the US has always been key to ONE’s global expansion plan, but that has proven over the last few years to be tough to crack as well.

Entering the Americas always involved a two-prong approach at the very least:

• Secure multi-million dollar contracts with the top US broadcasters to stream ONE’s fights worldwide. This will increase global viewership and position them to win sponsorships

• Organise a series of amazing MMA fights on-ground so fans can buy tickets to experience the show, see their MMA heroes up front, interact with other fans, buy merchandise…etc

But even after the COVID pandemic began to wane and live events resumed globally in 2023, ONE struggled to regain strong momentum on this front.

The latest hiccup — its highly anticipated US fight in Denver, Colorado originally slated for August 1 this year — has now been pushed to 2026.

ONE Championship's return to Denver has been put on ice.

The promotion announced Friday that ONE 173, which had been scheduled for Aug. 1 at Ball Arena, will not take place and a return to Denver won't happen until June 2026 "after Stamp Fairtex vs. Denice Zamboanga and multiple other title bouts did not materialize." (Source: MMA Junkie)

ONE Championship previously signed a multi-year broadcast deal with Amazon in 2022, following its lapsed deal with Turner, but based on a recent MMA Draw report citing sources, this may also be on the verge of ending.

In the high-stakes world of sports streaming, Amazon is not waiting for the music to stop. It is making moves now. Sources confirm Prime Video will not renew its deal with ONE Championship when it expires at the end of its term in 2025. The calculated exit is part of a broader shift, clearing the way for a potential bid on UFC’s pay-per-view rights. (Source: MMA Draw)

What next?⏱️

Until then, Sityodtong remains highly active on the PR front, including a highly-publicised appearance on Tim Ferriss’s podcast, and several vitriolic comments made on fellow Japanese MMA promoters eventually provoking a public retort on how “the weakest dogs bark the loudest”.

Even former heavyweight champions were not spared in recent weeks.

ONE Championship will likely continue to count on Qatar and the wider Gulf to grow its business where interest in sports media properties remains strong. However if the firm hasn’t yet fixed its cashburn and financials by now, it might need to do that quick.

25.5.2025. That was the historic “once in a century” date picked by the Dubai Land Department (DLD) to launch the city’s first token trade of a land title on a blockchain.

To explain the significance of this, a little context is needed.

Land is probably one of the oldest asset classes in the world. Over the years, land titles have been traded manually in the form of paper certificates or in digitised formats via a government-backed e-registry.

What Dubai has done wasn’t simply place these land titles on a public blockchain. (Ripple Labs’s XRP Ledger to be specific.) They’re also “fractionalising” it — cutting them into tiny little blocks so they can be bought and sold at a lower price point, enabling real estate ownership for many more people.

What this looks like in effect is commonfolk like you and I can now invest a fraction of a fancy premium Business Bay condo for as low as AED 2,000 (US$545) a pop. The sales pitch? Property ownership should be an accessible right to anyone and everyone, especially international investors, who Dubai is appealing to here.

The general consensus is that a project like this would have only been possible in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a country where government bureaucrats are highly zealous in placing themselves at the forefront of technological innovation.

While Hong Kong and Singapore regulators are still going back and forth on digital contracts, crypto adoption and licensing, Dubai is already launching live tokenised real estate products to the public. It’s a world first.

But it’s also where the ball stops rolling.

This sounds great, but why exactly is Dubai doing this?

Are they fractionalising real estate to resolve an illiquidity issue? Or are they doing this to help temper Dubai’s skyrocketing home prices?

As it turns out, it doesn’t seem to be the case for either.

Reality check #1: Dubai real estate is both liquid and affordable 💵

The research data shows that an overwhelming majority of Dubai’s real estate transactions are typically paid in cash and not mortgage, suggesting that the market doesn’t actually suffer an illiquidity issue.

According to Knight Frank, 86% of all Dubai real estate transactions were completed in cash in 2024.

While casual observers have often believed this to be driven by an influx of new ultra rich immigrants snapping up new homes, the reality is a little more nuanced.

Knight Frank’s head of MENA research, Faisal Durrani explained that because the majority (~70%) of Dubai’s real estate transactions are off-plan projects — or homes which are yet to be built — cash is the only available medium of transaction.

“When you're buying something off-plan or pre-construction in Dubai, you usually have to purchase it with a 20% cash deposit. You cannot get mortgages on an off-plan product until a certain construction milestone has been reached or until the property is completed…So it isn’t a surprise that cash transactions outweigh mortgage purchases,” said Durrani.

Many assume that Dubai’s property boom was driven mainly by premium segment sales but that wasn’t quite the case at all, corrected Knight Frank.

“The rate of growth in the luxury home segment of the market last year was 16.9% compared to 19.1% across the rest of the market. So the percentage increase was actually stronger in the mainstream market than it was in prime market,” shared Durrani.

He added that unlike previous property market cycles, more buyers today are purchasing properties to live in rather than using it for investment purposes.

Reality check #2: Dubai’s FDI is pretty diversified already 📊

The second most cited reason was that Dubai is fractionalising real estate to drive more FDI and diversify its FDI mix. But even that doesn’t completely tee up, especially when you consider the plausibility of execution.

“Why would an international investor sitting out of New York or Singapore want to buy a piece of a random condo unit in Downtown Dubai? How can they fully appreciate the value of that property as someone sitting from so far away?” questioned one Dubai startup founder.

“Unless that investor has lived in Dubai before and is well-acquainted with these neighbourhoods, he/she might find it difficult to understand what exactly they’re investing in. This is unique to real estate and isn’t quite the case with other asset classes like gold or bonds which may experience more success with fractional tokens,” he added requesting anonymity.

From an FDI diversification standpoint, the emirate’s FDI mix is also pretty spread out across sector and market.

According to official Dubai government statistics, the top two sectors are hotels & tourism and real estate which contribute 14% each to Dubai’s FDI mix, while the top two source countries are India and UK at 21.5% and 13.7% respectively. (See breakdown below.)

Dubai FDI capital by sector (2024)

Dubai FDI capital by country (2024)

Contrast that with Singapore, where its largest FDI sector, finance and insurance contributed 60.4% in FDI alone. The top five industries collectively made up 99.1% of total FDI inflows into Singapore.

When it comes to source country, the United States contributed nearly $50 billion or about 30% of Singapore’s total FDI of $191.56 billion in 2024. (See screenshots below.)

Singapore FDI capital by sector (2024)

Singapore FDI capital by country (2024)

Wait, so why are they doing this again? 🤔

So if Dubai’s real estate market isn’t suffering from illiquidity or a lack of mainstream demand, and the city’s FDI is well diversified, why are they going through all this effort to do this at all?

Intriguingly, the responses range quite widely across stakeholders — from lofty ideals of Gen Z financial inclusion to superficial vanity project. All of which don’t seem to support any underlying motivation around why any kind of technology (blockchain or otherwise) should be built in the first place — to solve an imminent problem.

There are also questions around market appetite and the potential implications on Dubai’s already skyrocketing property prices. Many of the rollout details are still fraught with scanty details.

Furthermore, Dubai’s patchy experience with real estate investment trusts (REITs) hasn’t displayed robust investor appetite for new asset classes in the sector as well.

The Dubai-listed Emirates REIT, one of the largest in the UAE, suffered declining asset valuations and high vacancies, eventually leading its share price to collapse during the COVID pandemic in 2020. Even today, trading liquidity remains low for the asset class.

Regardless, that hasn’t stopped Dubai’s DLD from advocating its new pet project. On Wednesday, Prypco, its UAE-licensed token trading platform partner sold out its second property in a “record-breaking time” of 1 minute and 58 seconds.

“This is the first time a title deed is tokenised…We're providing a new investment tool,” shared Dr Mahmoud AlBurai, Director of the Real Estate Policies and Innovation Department at Dubai Land Department (DLD) on an interview with local radio show, Dubai Eye 103.8.

“This is in alignment with our real estate strategy for 2033. We want to be the first choice for international investors. We want to go from 761 billion dirhams to 1 trillion dirhams by 2033. This is a new product where we enable small investors to invest in real estate with as little as 2,000 dirhams in the first stage,” he explained.

Dubai’s 2033 Real Estate Strategy & KPIs

• Double real estate sector’s contribution to Dubai’s GDP to AED 73 billion

• Increase homeownership rates to 33%

• Grow real estate transactions by 70%

• Raise market value to AED 1 trillion

• Expand Dubai’s real estate portfolio 20x to AED 20 billion

Source: Government of Dubai

While multiple stakeholders have lauded Dubai’s front-footed approach to employing blockchain innovation at scale, its true impact and success is less certain. It’s also worth questioning how much real value-add this project will bring to the real estate market itself.

"Dubai deserves credit for embracing new technologies and transaction options. It will take time for investors to understand the structure and risk of this investment option,” said Stewart Kirkham, an independent real estate consultant in the GCC.

“Currently, many aspects of the real estate market are working well, which is only demonstrated by the strong performance and incredible results of the past few years," he added.

Dubai Land Department (DLD) and Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) were contacted, but no response was received at the time of publishing this story.

Other reads! 🤓

• Dubai's RWA tokenisation experiment has begun (Kristie’s Substack)

• Dubai property rally closes in on pre-2008 record (Financial Times)

• Dubai real estate prices likely to face double-digit fall after years of boom, Fitch says (Reuters)

• Dubai Ruler’s $584 Million REIT IPO Surges In Debut (Bloomberg)

• The Ins and Outs of Fractional Property Investing (Business Times)

• The Blockchain Revolution: Making NYC Real Estate Accessible for $1,000 (Cointrust)

Some of you may have seen Clearworld publish its 2025 MENA Early Stage Handbook this morning :) I had a look and found some interesting data points. It certainly raises a lot more questions for the MENA VC/startup landscape moving forward.

Check out the full report here.

Meanwhile here’s a TLDR version :)

1. The number of Series A MENA startups remained unchanged in 2025 versus 2024

Clearworld doesn’t outline the reasons why Series A may be “stuck”, although one can easily guess. These are my personal hunches.

i) Series A founders are finding it difficult to raise Series B because MENA VCs are deploying less or taking longer to deploy, or are unwilling to lead.

ii) Series A rounds are getting extended by bridges/convertibles, so with longer runways they are not raising Series B as quickly (aka within a year)

Both of the above can apply to seed founders, who find themselves stuck and therefore and unable to “graduate” to Series A. However from my conversations with VCs/founders here, the funding gap in MENA tends to be in the Series B+ stages.

Clearworld anticipates that if this continues, 30% of MENA’s Series A startups could be written off by 2026 as the prospects of raising growth capital diminish.

2. There was a 30% jump in new AI companies but most of them were simply “rebranded” 👀

The chart above tracks the number of MENA companies going back to 2019 which “rebranded” themselves as AI companies in 2025. This created an artificial bump in new AI companies in MENA, which comes up to 332 firms in 2025 versus 256 firms in 2024.

More AI wrapper companies entering the pipeline… (Oops)

3. UAE is still the undisputed king of startup dealflow 👑

According to Clearworld, roughly half or 45.8% of all MENA startup dealflow comes from the UAE alone. Egypt and Saudi Arabia come in second and third, with dealflow market share of 21% and 15.4% respectively. This is from a total count of 3,600 active startups in 2025.

In other words, UAE has a startup pipeline of 1.3x the size of Saudi and Egypt combined. Saudi Arabia is displaying pipeline growth (even now) but it clearly still has quite a lot of catching up to do. UAE’s leadership can largely be attributed to its ability to attract talent and capital from across the region, which has been the case for several years now.

4. Crypto has a sizeable presence (No surprises here!) 🪙

Dubai has placed a lot of focus to turn itself into a global hub for crypto.

Setting up a virtual assets regulator (VARA) to create dedicated regulatory frameworks, fostering partnerships and events (TOKEN 2049), opening its doors to global crypto majors like Bybit, Binance, Chainalysis, OKX to set up HQs, and more recently, encouraging real asset tokenisation starting with real estate.

So it’s no wonder crypto founders are choosing to set up shop in the UAE. According to Clearworld, investors can expect to meet one crypto startup out of every 20, and twice as many if you filter out the non-tech folks.

5. Seed and Series A tickets, round sizes and valuations are still trending up 📈

Perhaps the juiciest of all — fundraising data. According to Clearworld, seed and Series A startups are still commanding pre-money valuations, tickets and round sizes displaying an “increasing” trend. You may refer to the table above.

Depending on how this data was captured, it is difficult to tell whether down rounds have happened already (or are baked into a convertible). If early-stage startups are extending their runways (as they should during challenging markets), it will be interesting to see how far they will still be able to command rising valuations in this environment.

Most of the global investors I’ve spoken with tend to flinch at MENA valuations, especially when they’re Saudi startups. Given the macro aversion towards VC and startups globally, I think the MENA startups which will be able to raise successfully will have to display compelling category leadership, show positive unit economics and/or target a global rather than a regional TAM.

What do you think about the data though? I’d love to hear your thoughts :)

Most private investment firms prefer to be discreet about their financials (Saudi ones, most of all!) But it seems Impact46 has chosen to buck the trend.

Since its inception in 2019, the Saudi Arabian early-stage venture capital firm has been uploading its fully audited financials on its website, giving us a unique peek into the VC’s funds and performance.

I’ve taken a look at Impact46’s latest FY2024 financials, and they do yield pretty interesting insights.

So what do we have here?

Let’s start with a bit of methodology before we dive in.

Impact46 did not disclose its total funds under management, but it is possible to do a reverse calculation from its disclosure of management fees.

Assuming Impact46 received the industry standard of 2% for its fund management fees, you can calculate the size of each of its funds. (See excel sheet below.)

Of course there may be cases where management fees may be slightly higher or lower than 2%. This is where I have to make a small caveat — I have applied 2% across the board for the calculation of these funds.

All dollar amounts are converted to US dollars (USD) from Saudi riyals (SAR).

Let’s begin.

Observation 1: Impact46’s funds under management grew 21.9% to $340.5m (SAR 1.26 billion) in FY2024

Based on the above tabulation, Impact46 managed a total of $340.5 million (SAR 1.25 billion in FY2024, a 21.9% increase from the year before. This was across 9 active funds, ranging widely in stage and sector.

Impact46 made some tweaks to its funds from 2023 to 2024, injecting new cash into some existing vehicles. It wound up two funds, and set up a new one.

Let’s take a look below.

Impact46’s biggest funds in 2024 (ranked by size):

• Impact Fund Third Version: $143.3 million (SAR 530 million)

• Venture Capital Insurtech Fund: $74.5 million (SAR 276 million)

• Impact Growth Fund: $66 million (SAR 244.8 million)

New cash was injected into 3 funds in 2024:

• Impact Fund Third Version: +214.5% to $143.3 million (SAR 530 million)

• Venture Capital Insurtech Fund: +386% to $74.5 million (SAR 276 million)

• Venture Capital Emerging Technologies Fund: +22.9% to $4.8 million (SAR 17.7 million)

Two funds appear to have been wound up in 2024:

• Information Technology and ECommerce Sector: $106.2 million (SAR 393.4 million) in 2023 versus $0 in 2024

• Venture Capital E-Commerce and Online Sales Sector Fund: No fees received for 2023-24; but it distributed dividends in 2023.

A new fund was formed that same year:

• Venture Capital Fund in Electronic Games and Sports: $10.8 million (SAR 40 million) versus $0 in 2023

Impact46 did announce a new SAR 150 million gaming and esports fund with the National Development Fund (NDF) and the Social Development Bank (SDB) in March 2024. This could be in the form of a co-GP model shared with NDF and SDB.

Observation 2: Impact46 is already receiving dividends (!!)

So this is the crazy bit.

Impact46 is already returning shareholder dividends at a time when most VCs globally are still agonising about the lack of DPI. More remarkably, Impact46 was just set up in 2019, which means the firm is only about 6 years old — at roughly the half-way mark of a standard 10-12 year tenure fund.

This is its definition of dividend income based on its statement: “Dividend income is 20% percent of realised gains of the related management, after the exit and liquidation of each related investment from the fund's investments.”

Let’s take a look at the numbers.

2023 was a significantly stronger year with $131.3 million (SAR SAR 486.4 million) in total dividends generated across 4 funds, with the bulk coming from the Information Technology and Ecommerce Sector Fund contributing $129.3 million (SAR 479.2 million) alone.

The other dividend contributors in 2023 were: Impact Growth Fund, Impact Seed Fund; and Venture Capital E-commerce and Online Sales Sector Fund.

2024 saw a much smaller dividend contribution of $7.1 million (SAR 26.2 million) across two funds — Venture Capital Insurtech Fund and Impact Growth Fund.

It is fair to say that most of the other funds are still in harvesting mode; have not exited and/or hold assets which are pre-profit.

It is not clear how many or exactly which or what kind of exits contributed to these dividends, but Impact46 has publicly listed these exits on its website: Tamara, Jahez, Lendo, The Chefz, Sanad Cash.

It also recently announced a full exit from Rasan via its latest Tadawul IPO earlier this year. This might suggest another year of good shareholder returns for Impact46 for the FY2025 financial year.

Observation 3: Impact46 hired a Big 4 as auditor for FY2024

Impact46 hired PwC to be its financial auditor for FY2024, replacing its previous local auditor of the last two years, Alluhaid & Alyahya.

The move to pick a “Big 4” accounting firm signals intentions to align itself with global financial reporting standards.

Impact46’s decision to publicly disclose its audited financials (despite being a privately run investment firm) also shows a willingness to be accountable and be taken seriously, not just within Saudi Arabia but in the wider global investment industry.

Impact46 was founded in 2019 by Abdulaziz Alomran who serves as its CEO. The Riyadh-based venture capital fund is also led by Basmah Alsinaidi, who serves as partner and head of asset management. According to its website, Impact46 has over 35 portfolio companies in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East.

This publication did not receive a response from Impact46 at the time of publishing this story.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated with additional background quotes and clarifications.

Southeast Asia telehealth firm WhiteCoat is found to be implicated in the forging of cancer screening test papers at its clinics in Vietnam.

The development was first reported by local publication, Saigon Online, citing a surprise inspection conducted by Ho Chi Minh health authorities on April 17 at Whitecoat’s Ho Chi Minh office.

The incident involved an unnamed genetic testing company in Ho Chi Minh City, which provided cancer screening services to WhiteCoat Vietnam for periodic health checks for employees.

A discrepancy in test sample numbers was first discovered by the genetic testing firm, leading it to submit an official notice to WhiteCoat, before triggering a wider police investigation into the matter.

One indirect source told this publication that Vietnamese genetic testing firm Gene Solutions and local insurer MB Ageas Life were involved in the discovery of the document forgery.

Gene Solutions is a August Global Partners and Mekong Capital-backed genetic testing firm with offices in Vietnam and across Southeast Asia.

Gene Solutions and MB Ageas Life could not be reached at the time of publishing this story.

A separate direct source shared that the forgery was found in Hanoi instead of Ho Chi Minh. This involved one of WhiteCoat’s Hanoi employees who approached an unauthorised party to produce fake cancer screening test results in the name of one of their corporate partners.

The same source added that an internal investigation was started by WhiteCoat a few weeks ago, who reported the matter to Vietnamese authorities and led to the inspection at WhiteCoat’s Vietnam office. It is also understood that the guilty WhiteCoat employee is no longer at the firm.

WhiteCoat declined to comment on the identities of the partners involved, but said that only one company was involved in it.

The Singapore healthtech startup further added that this was an isolated case of employee misconduct where “errant personnel orchestrated the engagement of an unauthorised party to provide certain services to a corporate client of WhiteCoat Vietnam.”

“We have reported the matter to the relevant authorities in Vietnam. Immediately after it was uncovered, we proactively engaged and continue to actively work with the affected corporate client to resolve the issue.

Most importantly, we understand that there is no impact to the medical treatment and health of the individuals involved. Our clients remain supportive and our medical and healthcare services remain unaffected by this matter.

To eliminate any recurrence of such cases, we are thoroughly reviewing our processes for the appointment of external vendors, and staff adherence to these protocols and processes,” wrote a WhiteCoat spokesperson in an email statement.

WhiteCoat is a telehealth startup operating in Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia Indonesia. Last year, it acquired Good Doctor Indonesia, which gave the firm an accumulated regional client base of 130 insurers and 7,500 corporate partners.

The firm was last reported to have been backed by Raffles Family Office, SoftBank Vision Fund and MDI Ventures, as part of the deal to acquire Good Doctor.

It is understood that SoftBank Vision Fund and MDI Ventures are not yet investors with WhiteCoat since the acquisition is not completely finalised.

No one has been immune to Trump’s tariff tantrums. In the Gulf, where sovereign wealth remains the support pillar for its incredibly young startup ecosystem, venture capitalists are keeping a close watch over the latest turn of events.

Startups in the Middle East and Africa are already raising less as cautious investors hold back on capital deployments. According to Magnitt, Middle East and African startups raised $1.5 billion and $1.1 billion respectively in 2024 — a 29% and 44% corresponding drop from the previous year.

The market volatility has already taken the wind out of US IPOs with Klarna, StubHub and eToro Group all putting their listing plans on hold.

This is likely to play out in the Gulf as well, except that in the Middle East, many investors have been eagerly waiting for this IPO window to open only to realise that they may have to wait a little bit longer.

“The question that keeps coming up in this region is – where are the exits? Where are the exits? We're finally at a position where we have a lot of companies coming up and marching towards IPO and are exitable,” shared Sonia Gokhale, general partner, VentureSouq at UNConference 2025 last week.

“If the Trump (tariffs) were not happening, we’d be like, great, we’re finally at a place where we’re getting IPOs…(But I think that) some of these exits which people have been waiting for might just get delayed,” she added.

The Gulf’s venture capital (VC) industry is among the youngest globally and remains highly financed by sovereign oil wealth. Saudi Arabia’s push into VC, tech and startups only began as recently as 2016-18 after the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ascended to de facto ruler of the Kingdom.

However, his ambitious Vision 2030 plans, which include multi-billion dollar giga-projects like NEOM and The Line, have reportedly been scaled back due to a variety of reasons including rising costs.

Last month, Saudi’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) imposed a one year ban on any new advisory work going to PwC, signaling tighter scrutiny over the management of its projects.

If oil prices continue to slide lower than $60 a barrel as they have during Trump’s tariff tirade, the question is whether VC and startups across the Middle East will continue to enjoy the same continued generosity in sovereign support.

“(The sovereigns) are able to spend, but at the same time it’s not conducive on a global stage. They’re the only ones that are actually pumping money into the ecosystem. So the government needs to be a lot more selective today. I’m not saying that there’s no money, I’m not saying there’s tons of money, but it is very, very, very selective,” said Walid Faza, partner, Novo Capital at Fluidity 2025 in Dubai.

In many ways, the GCC is still remarkably insulated from most of the market shocks happening to VC and tech everywhere else globally.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE in particular, enjoys relatively higher GDP per capita compared to other emerging markets. Both currencies are also pegged to the greenback, which means foreign investors can still participate in emerging market growth without too much exposure to currency risk.

Startup valuations are still high compared to other emerging markets, note investors. But with tech talent still moving into the Gulf, this could still be a good time for builders to build and for early-stage investors to invest.

For now at least, it’s watch-and-see mode until the market jitters shake out. Fund managers still have plenty of dry powder left to deploy, so that will likely keep MENA’s startup ecosystem supported in the near term.

But if the global economy takes a sharp turn, scenarios can change quickly.

“I do feel like if we actually enter into recession it would be a very different story,” said Courtney Powell, chief operating officer, 500 Global.

“The Saudi market has been largely sheltered from major macro swings over the past few years so I don’t expect that to change...But where I could see things affect this region is oil prices. If oil prices stay where they are today, then I think all bets are off. Six months from now, things could look very, very different,” she cautioned.

If there’s one thing Singapore does impeccably well at, it is to plan. And no plan could be more crucial or important at this juncture than the one to save the very sad, very distressed Singapore Exchange (SGX).

How sad, you ask?

Well, so sad that more companies are leaving the SGX than they are entering. In 2024, a total of 17 companies left the exchange compared to a meagre four IPOs. The departing firms cite weak liquidity and high costs among the reasons for leaving. Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, Indonesia and Malaysia are both enjoying a healthy line of IPOs, a trend set to continue well into 2025.

Read more

This article first appeared on my Linkedin page on 21 January 2025.

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As if a startup scandal or two wasn’t enough for Southeast Asia, the tech ecosystem has delivered yet another stinker. This time it’s eFishery, an aquaculture unicorn from Indonesia, found to have committed financial irregularities. The company’s founders reportedly kept two accounting books and “round-tripped” its transactions to inflate revenue figures.

A total of $315 million was raised by eFishery’s founders from the likes of Singapore’s Temasek Holdings, Abu Dhabi’s G42 42X Fund and SoftBank Group Corp. Vision Fund and others on a towering $1.3 billion, making it one of the largest unicorns in the region.

It’s also the biggest and probably the most embarrassing of startup blowups in the last two years.

What the fish?

Founded in 2013, eFishery started as a fish feed company by Bandung natives, Gibran Huzaifah and Chrisna Aditya. The pair developed an electronic fish feeding device aimed at helping small-scale farmers lower operating costs, improve farm yield and ultimately raise incomes.

But similar to many other tech-enabled businesses in Indonesia, eFishery was operating in a highly informal sector. Fishing and aquaculture is a traditional business. There are somewhere between 30 to 40 million fish and shrimp farms across Indonesia’s sprawling archipelago, most of them small family-owned enterprises and farmers in far-flung islands who lack access to technology and capital.

The challenge here wasn’t simply a matter of execution. How do you verify the amount of produce these poor fish farmers were cultivating hundreds of miles away? How do you do that at scale by the thousands? And do it over and over again?

“There’s no real way,” acknowledged one investor in confidence. Not unless you manually inspected every aquaculture farm, counted every single fish, weighed every bag of feed. “Maybe there could be a business opportunity to conduct inspection audits for investors in Indonesia,” joked the Jakartan resident.

But the uncomfortable truth no one wants to publicly admit is that these sorts of financing shenanigans are a lot more common than people think. Many of Indonesia’s early tech giants and fintechs often resorted to such methods to boost toplines. They were just lucky to have never been caught red handed, say investors and operators.

eFishery had a great story. Huzaifah and Aditya were graduates from Institut Teknologi Bandung, one of Indonesia’s most reputable universities. Both came from modest backgrounds and started tackling big problems right out of school. They weren’t the typical Ivy League, overseas-educated sons of real estate or mining tycoons like so many other “successful” founders of their generation.

But eFishery’s investors were razor-focused on one thing — its massive TAM (total addressable market). Indonesia is the world’s second largest aquaculture producer after China. It’s a $9.7 billion industry growing at 13.7% a year on just 7.38% of Indonesia’s total potential area for aquaculture, according to eFishery’s Sustainability Report 2023.

On paper, the founders claimed eFishery was already profitable on the back of hundreds of millions in revenue. In reality, none of it was real. What was more damning was how far the aquaculture unicorn got away with its story. The fabrication of numbers began way back in 2018, during eFishery’s $4 million Series A round.

Wake-up call

The eFishery scandal is forcing many local investors to take a very hard look in the mirror. This is not a good picture in the eyes of foreign investors, many of whom were persuaded over many years that Southeast Asia’s time had come, and that it was a market worth taking the risk.

“At least in Zilingo, the funds were being used to drive growth,” said another investor requesting anonymity, as if there was any meaningful comparison to be made at all between the two misdeeds. But if both institutional and local investors can get bamboozled like this, how can anyone else be completely insured from such incidents happening again?

The unfortunate truth is that Southeast Asia is no longer short of founder fraud stories, and there seems to be a gnawing expectation that more such spectacular blowups may occur. Many of the exposed culprits are still not held accountable today.

Adrian Gunadi, the founder of troubled peer-to-peer (P2P) lender Investree, is rumoured to still be at large and escaped to Doha. Pamitra Wineka, founder of fellow P2P lender, Tanihub, got himself a new job. Today he is the independent commissioner and audit chairman of MIND ID (Mining Industry Indonesia), an Indonesian state-owned mining industry company.

Both companies face lawsuits for suspected fraud or embezzlement of funds.

In other cases, AI founders were caught for faking Ivy League PhD certificates, while others like Vietnam’s Sy Phong Bui was found to have creatively repurposed former company intellectual property into a completely new venture (Telio).

If too many bad actors get away scot-free, the concern is that these may send the wrong signal and hold the region back even further. It’s also worth questioning if Southeast Asian investors were simply not up to the task of due diligence in their own home markets?

Many venture capitalists are already voting with their cheque books.

Startup funding hit its lowest point in 6 years during the first nine months of 2024, according to DealStreetAsia’s latest data report. Only 134 equity rounds were recorded in Southeast Asia across $979 million, signalling a 24% drop from the previous quarter.

There is a growing pattern in the types of startups that investors are looking for now. I keep hearing the same tag words among early-stage investors. "Cash flow positive", "growth-stage", "monetising", "near profitable". AI companies? Forget it. AI-enabled, sounds more like it.

“We have become SME investors now,” confided one Southeast Asian tech investor.