Middle East and North Africa’s IT Infrastructure field: 17 Investors With the Biggest Sums of Money

Intro

According to some classifications, IT infrastructure components can be divided into two main branches: software and hardware. The former includes a variety of practices and services, such as operating systems, resource planning, systems for managing content and customer relationship (CMS and CRM), to name but a few; the latter refers to rather tangible devices and objects, like servers, routers, data centers, technical support spots and so on. However, recent developments in the industry suggest that a precise approach would also be a division of IT infrastructure into two types: traditional and cloud. Although usual facilities still provide their services, cloud-based architecture is conquering the market at an immense speed and is predicted to be a trend in the field in 2021. An impressive 94% of enterprises globally already use cloud services, and the cloud computing market was estimated at $371.4B worth in 2020. Performing more than a 2-fold increase, it is predicted to reach USD 832.1 billion by 2025.
With plenty of space for startups to emerge and provide brand-new solutions for the market, VC funds and corporate investors in different regions across the globe are actively joining the financing. In North Africa and the Middle East alone, funding in the IT Infrastructure industry brought $1.3B, accounting for a 3.3% share of all money raised in the region over the 2 years. 17 investors, analyzed in the article and presented on the diagram, appear to provide the most significant shares of capital. According to the sums of money put in, they can be arranged in the following order:

Middle East and North Africa’s IT Infrastructure field: 17 Investors With the Biggest Sums of Money
data provided by Unicorn Nest

Key takeaways

• Funds Geography – Noticeably, all the listed funds are based in Israel. More than half of the firms reside in Tel Aviv, which is home to 12 VCs. Others are spread across the country in Jerusalem, Rosh Ha’ayin, and Ra’anana. The majority of the companies tend to put money into startups from Israel, the country of their origin, and sometimes support projects coming from the United States.
• Industry Focus – In descending order, the funds listed put the most money into Finance, Business Development, Enterprise Software, and Gamification fields.
• Important Years – With a 30-year difference between them, the oldest (BRM Capital) and the newest (ION Crossover Partners) funds were created in 1988 and 2018, respectively. The majority of the firms started operating in 1993. From 2002 up to 2021, firms listed experienced the peak of activity, with 2020 ending as the most productive year for several companies.
• Investments – Usually, the funds start from two rounds and participate in no more than 6 rounds per year. The maximum and minimum for this figure are 212 and 8, with the latter possessed by ION Crossover Partners. The highest number of lead investments, 53, is around 4 times lower than the previous one. The average values for the two types of investments are 46.9 and 10.8, and the medians are 29.0 and 7.0, respectively. The most common numbers are 0 for lead investments and 8 for the standard ones. -31.0-29.0 is the range where there lies the difference between lead investments and the average ones, calculated in percentage points. With a median of 5.19 and an average of 4.79 points, this index suggests that certain funds from the list lead the financing more frequently. The mode of the presented data is 29.0.
• Typical Rounds – Although the sampled companies were recorded entering at all stages, Private Equity is not as common for them as Seed, Late, and Early rounds. VCs usually participate in rounds with 3-4 investors and rarely increase this number to 4-5. The size of the round commonly does not exceed 100 000; less often, the financing reaches 10-50 million dollars per round. With a median of 0.17, the fund’s portfolio companies’ multiplicator averages at 12258823.97. As the last known valuation measured, it reaches 208400000.0 points at maximum. The most frequently appearing multiplicator is 0.0.

All coming from Israel, the funds that provided the most money for the IT Infrastructure industry in the last 2 years tend to participate in 2 or 2-6 rounds per year. While they tend to invest no more than 100 thousand at once, this value can rise up to 10-50 million dollars for some startups. The industries which attract the listed VCs are Finance, Business Development, Gamification, and Enterprise Software.