ECOSYSTEM | WHO’S GOT VC | Q&A | STARTUP FINANCE
Plug and Play with the Abu Dhabi Global Market team
Mehrinfar doesn’t hold back in his praise for ADGM and what its team –which includes Richard Teng, Wai Lum Kwok, Vishal Sacheendran, among others- are doing in the UAE. “The typical trend in the technology field is that the regulator tends to lag behind the innovator,” he notes. “What is unique in the case of the GCC region, and specifically ADGM, is that the regulator is actually the one promoting and investing into the growth of the innovation sector, in our case for fintech. We’ve structured our partnership into phases. This initial phase will be to set up a multi-corporate fintech innovation platform, and to onboard leading and forwardthinking financial institutions that operate in or in regional proximity to Abu Dhabi, to act as corporate partners. We’ll be sourcing startups based on these corporate partners’ pain points and technology interest areas, shared by their respective business lines and innovation teams. Once the startups are sourced, go through our screening processes, and are voted in by the corporates, they’ll enter an extensive accelerator program focused on matchmaking the solutions with potential opportunities to scale their products here in the region. We’ll be sourcing for startups locally and out of our different international hubs, that have a proven
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“FOR OUR ACCELERATOR PROGRAM, WE’RE LOOKING TO ATTRACT EARLY TO GROWTH STAGE STARTUPS, SINCE THEIR PRODUCT NEED TO BE ENTERPRISE READY FOR OUR CORPORATE PARTNERS HERE IN THE REGION.” track record of scaling with major enterprises, to help them scale even further, especially in the MENA region. More so than being a free program for our startups, where we don’t take equity or charge them for any of our services, they also gain regulatory mentorship and support by ADGM’s RegLabs. The regulatory resources and know-how the ADGM team have provided for fintechs can help secure them to be regionally compliant to expedite their business development cycles as they enter the GCC, and the larger MENA region.” It should become clear here that the Plug and Play team have big dreams ahead for their time in the Middle East- and a part of the reason for that can be attributed to the fact that while they are both American, Mehrinfar and Ramadan have strong personal
ties to the Arab world. Mehrinfar is half-Bahraini and was born in Manama, while Ramadan’s parents are both originally from Lebanon. The Middle East is thus a region the two are, in a way, familiar with, but it also offers a load of opportunities for an entity like Plug and Playthough there are plenty of inherent challenges in the ecosystem as well. “The Middle East, for a very long time, was an environment where people were worried about the concept of failing,” Mehrinfar says. “The typical conception was that if you entered into a business as an entrepreneur and failed, you were effectively perceived as a failure. This misconception was not just prevalent in the Middle East, but in countries such as Singapore and in regions going as far as South-East Asia. Today however, there’s been a 180-degree flip. The new wave of the millennials in the region are so driven, and eager to develop and innovate. The hunger is there, we’ve already seen a few success stories such as Careem and Souq.com. The number of major league startups can increase in the region by way of, one- major players in the government and private sectors to provide resources for these entrepreneurs to gain exposure, especially to outside, and more developed ecosystems, we’re already seeing this to a certain extent developing. Two, would be by decreasing the disparity between the number of startups and the amount of venture capital funding available to startups here in the region. In the US, venture capital funding accounts for 0.3% of the country’s overall GDP. Here in the GCC, that number is just below 0.03% of the overall GDP. By having more funding available to local entrepreneurs, we would be able to empower them to gain the appropriate know-how and hire the needed talent from abroad (if needed), to be able to scale them to an international playing field.” According to Mehrinfar, the lack of funding options may be what’s stunting the growth of the Middle East entrepreneurial ecosystem. “Although attitudes have shifted
IMAGE CREDIT PLUG AND PLAY
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