When venture capitalist Noor Sweid was approached to be a judge on Dubai’s version of the hit show Shark Tank, she needed some convincing.
The US-born, Dubai-based Sweid had already established herself as a big name in the business and investing worlds. In her 20s, she’d founded a successful yoga studio chain, ZenYoga, then led her father’s interior contracting company Depa through a $1.1 billion IPO. A decade later, she founded the VC firm Global Ventures, which today has hundreds of millions of dollars in assets under active management, and has invested in unicorns including buy now, pay later firm Tabby and Kitopi, an operator of smart kitchens.
But putting herself out there in the media spotlight was a completely new direction for someone who didn’t even have a Facebook account.
“I was very, very nervous,” she told MONIIFY’s Money Moves. “My middle child … was like, ‘Mom, you’re always telling us to go outside our comfort zone and try new things.’”
Sweid’s son, who has inherited her entrepreneurial streak, was a big fan of Shark Tank. He told Sweid he’d learned more about business and investing from watching other versions of the show than anything he’d been taught in school.
“So that was really what got me to say yes,” she says. “From there, it just kind of spiraled.”
Since then, Sweid has leaned in hard to her new role as a kind of guru on startups and investment for young entrepreneurs in the Middle East. She’s grown a huge following on Instagram by answering fundamental questions for aspiring founders, in Arabic and English. What’s the difference between seed and pre-seed? How do I make a pitch deck? What should I ask a VC?
She’s written a book about how digital innovation and entrepreneurship are changing the face of the region, and there’s a podcast in the works.
“There’s a huge community of people that want to learn how to build businesses, that want to learn how to get funding… learn how to invest – and in a language that no one was speaking to them in,” she says.
As a VC pioneer who has founded and scaled up companies, and built a reputation for helping Gulf startups go global, who better than Sweid to turn to for advice?
In a wide-ranging interview with Money Moves’ Muhammed Mekki, Sweid discusses where she sees the next big opportunity for Gulf companies to make their mark and how to establish credibility in business.
Here are three takeaways from the conversation:
- AI is overvalued. The AI bubble is real, says Sweid, and she wouldn’t invest in the tech until the prices come down. Instead, she recommends checking out companies working on blockchain-related solutions.
- There’s nothing wrong with copycats. It’s not the nicest label – they prefer being called emulators, says Sweid – but they have their place. About half of the companies in Global Ventures’ portfolio are emulators, including the unicorn buy now, pay later platform Tabby.
- Don’t assume Silicon Valley is already doing your idea. Founders in emerging markets, take note: you can launch a global success story from anywhere. She points to Dubai-based Enhance Fitness, an on-demand personal trainer booking platform that’s launched in the US and is expanding to Europe.
Muhammed Mekki: With your VC firm Global Ventures, you’re known for helping startups from the Gulf region succeed. What’s your favorite story of a company from here going global?
Noor Sweid: One that’s most recent [is] Enhance Fitness – a company based in Dubai. The founder is Tarek Mounir, formerly the CEO of Deezer in the region.
He set up a personal training system. And we like B2B and SaaS solutions at Global Ventures. So, when he first approached us… he said: gyms have a huge lost opportunity because they don’t manage their PTs well.
So, he wanted to go into gyms and say: I will manage your PTs for you. I have… a scheduling software and I’m going to figure this out. I’ll put the PTs on my payroll, I’m going to send them in with people. Then he went to hotels and said: you guys have gyms that are under-utilized most of the day. If I send you a customer and a PT, and you take a revenue share, does that work?
Then he set up the marketplace side for customers like me that could go on an app and say, OK, I’m going to book a trainer. Ten sessions. I want something within a two-kilometer radius of me … and it’ll send me to a gym or a hotel or whatever they’ve contracted with, without me having a membership.
The first-year revenues were a million dollars. The next year were five, the next year were 12. This year, it’s over 20.
- Mekki: At what point did you get in?
Right at the beginning. He’s now rolled out with Crunch in the US. Forty gyms this year, another 200 next year. This is now an international company. They’re expanding into Europe.
- Mekki: Surely there were other players who were thinking about this space? How were they able to capture a US market from here? What was the special sauce?
I think it was the idea. But also the application, the dashboard, the tech – all of it – is globally competitive. And I think that this is one of our challenges in the MENA region is this mindset of whatever someone’s doing here, there’s got to be someone in San Francisco doing it better. The answer is: no, that’s not necessarily true.
- Mekki: What kinds of business do you think the Gulf region is particularly well suited for? If you were going to start a company, here and now, what spaces are you most excited about?
Agritech and food security… I think that’s a game changer for the next five to 10 years. I think this region will solve a lot of it because of the need.
One of the companies that we like is called Iyris. They’ve innovated out of the region… they were at KAUST [Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology].
They found a way to allow any indoor farming to reduce energy consumption … by studying the cactus plant. They found a way that they could desalinate water differently.
You no longer needed to have all the energy consumption for the processing of water, which was one of the biggest cost components of indoor farming. They created a material where you could capture 90% of the light, but only 40% of the heat, if you created this film on top of the vertical farms or the indoor farms. They started building this now based in the UAE, exporting to 15 markets.
You start to take a look and you say: this is technology that was created here. The patents are here as well. Why? Because of the acute need for food security. We still import 85% of our food. How do you get to a point where agritech enables that?
- Mekki: Are there any other sectors that come to mind?
Supply chain tech is just paramount at this point in time… all the way from manufacturing to last mile.
I think that we, sitting in Dubai, sitting in the region, will reinvent everything.
If you think of last mile logistics, this is one of the first parts of the world to have drone deliveries. Four-hundred kilo payloads on commercial drones. And if you think about road infrastructure in many parts of the world, it doesn’t exist.
So you start to think… lack of road infrastructure means that drones are a better solution than old diesel trucks on rickety roads, or a lack of roads, in emerging markets. Where is that likely to be developed? Somewhere nearby that understands the problem and has the ability to create a solution.
So you end up in the UAE. In Abu Dhabi and Dubai, we have commercial drones. We don’t see them much, but we have them far ahead of where Europe and the US have them. Maybe not as sophisticated as China. But supply chain – from manufacturing all the way to last mile – is where I see the next five or 10 years, this part of the world, really bringing in solutions.
- Mekki: You were still in your 20s when you got involved in your father’s business, Depa, as MD of strategy, leading the company to a huge IPO in 2008. What prepared you for taking on such a big challenge so early in your career?
I started my career in Boston. Consulting, biotech – completely unrelated. Did my MBA, came back to Dubai consulting. And then it was gradual – working with my father, with the family business, was never the plan.
I helped put together a board… leveraging my area of expertise, which was more strategy, a bit of compliance processes, governance, growth. That strategy consulting that I had done for years, bringing that to the table.
I would never have been able to walk onto a project site and tell you what’s going right or wrong. And I believe that the CEO of any company should always know how the money’s made. So as long as I can’t walk onto a site, or look at a bid, and say what’s right and wrong, I have no business running the business.
But I’m happy to guide on strategy, growth planning, all the stuff where I was strong and I knew where to add value. I think when you enter the family business, it’s important to keep that in mind, to say: this is my niche, this is where I’m strong.
The rest? You know, I’m happy if you ask me a question but my advice is not worth much. And I think that’s important for life. I think when people get in the family business, sometimes they want to be involved with everything, and that can create friction.
Going in and being very transparent about what you don’t know can have that real impact of saying: OK, maybe this person is credible.
- Mekki: As a shark on Shark Tank you’ve heard all sorts of pitches. What’s the most memorable one?
One of the ones that really stuck out …is Biosapien. [The founder] has built a 3D-printed chip … that can be stapled or sewed onto any tumor that reduces the size of any tumor. It can carry any medication. They’ve started with chemotherapy. And by doing that using laparoscopy, you avoid all of the IV of chemo. So you avoid all the side effects.
As a patient, you feel a lot more human because you’re not going in for all these IV drips. Once they staple the chip onto the tumor, it reduces the tumor size. They’re now in live clinical trials with the Cleveland Clinic in Abu Dhabi.
- Mekki: Finally, let’s imagine you’re established in your first job and you’ve pulled together your first $10,000 of investable money. How do you spend it?
Today? Not AI – it’s overvalued. Maybe in two years once it comes back down.
Any area that has a lot of capital following it, the valuations tend to go up. It’s great. You create a bubble… the capital and the bubble build infrastructure.
And then a couple of years later, you’re left with the infrastructure, which is amazing to build off of.
The same applies in real estate. Money flows in. Bubbles. Prices go down, but the real estate stays.
Blockchain: bubble, money flows in, it was great. And then ultimately you build up all this amazing infrastructure, all these different protocols.
I would actually invest in a company that’s building something on the blockchain. The infrastructure is there, and you’re building real value-add companies. We have a few in the portfolio. We’re seeing so many more opportunities. The infrastructure there is very cheap.
Now how do you use it to build it to build something meaningful? Today I would say take a look at blockchain-based solutions that are solving real problems.
