Hospitality Industry: Middle East and North Africa’s Top 8 Seed Rounds Investors

Intro

The article and a diagram introduce the Middle East and North Africa’s top eight VC funds and corporate investors, rated according to the size of funding rounds in the Hospitality industry over the last four years.

In the given period, the listed funds participated in 10 seed rounds. The sum of money invested accounted for 1.9% of the total amount of seed rounds investments in the industry.

Hospitality Industry: Middle East and North Africa’s Top 8 Seed Rounds Investors
data provided by Unicorn Nest

Key takeaways

• Funds Geography – Roughly half of the 8 top funds are based in Israel (two of them in Tel-Aviv), one – in neighboring Lebanon, and the three others – in the United Arab Emirates and Turkey. Since the majority of the funds tend to invest in the country of their establishment, startups from Israel attracted the most money, followed by those from Turkey, the US, and Mauritius.
• Industry Focus – With the main focus placed on Banking, the listed funds invest in various spheres, from Business Development to Information Technology and Transportation.
• Important Years – 2015 has shown the highest number of funds established, with three VCs created that year and another one, Speed Accelerator, back in 2014. Other four were set up even earlier, in 2010 and 2012, two funds per each of those years. While for most of the funds 2013 to 2020 was the period of the most significant activity, some VCs closed their highest number of deals in 2018.
• Investments – Typically, VCs participate in 2-6 rounds per year, with the maximum number of rounds being 186 for AltaIR Capital. In some cases, this figure lies in a range of 7 to 12 or 13 to 24 rounds. Although 3 out of 8 funds did not provide any lead investments, half of the top 8 were lead investors from 10 to 16 times each. The average numbers of funding rounds and lead investments are 32.4 and 7, respectively. The index of difference of lead investments, which is between -71.0 and 29.0 percentage points and has a median of 11.05, indicates that some funds (in this case, for instance, AltaIR Capital and Speed Accelerator) act as lead investors more often than the rest from the list. The mode of the investments data is 29.0.
• Typical Rounds – On average, the VCs participate in rounds with two or three investors and a round size of less than 100 000. Less often, there are 10-50 or 50-100 million sizes and 3 or more investors participating, as in the case with Agrinnovation and 500 Istanbul. At least one fund, Speed Accelerator, has a round size lower than 1M, and only two show no more than two investors taking part. The highest average multiplicator (0.31) is that of PICO Venture Partners, with 0.15 for AltaIR Capital and 0.05 for BECO Capital following.