Nuwa Capital, a Dubai- and Riyadh-based venture capital firm has announced the closing of its maiden fund at $75 million. The firm plans on deploying this new fund, dubbed Nuwa Ventures Fund I (NVFI), in helping promising startups from MENA, Turkey, Pakistan, and Sub-Saharan Africa scale and grow.
While the $75 million worth of capital makes it one of the largest VC funds in the region, Nuwa aims to raise additional capital to score a final close of $100 million by the end of 2021.
Nuwa Capital was officially launched almost a year ago in early 2020 by co-founders Khaled Talhouni, Sarah Abu Risheh, and Stephanie Nour Prince.
It has already made investments in three companies in Egypt and the UAE. Nuwa is, by design, a sector-agnostic VC platform. Although, currently, it is focusing primarily on fast-growing sectors such as FinTech, SaaS, EdTech, Direct-to-consumer, and PropTech, among others.
Khaled Talhouni, the Managing Partner at Nuwa Capital, commented the following after the success of its first close at $75 million: “We launched the fund in a year forever marked with the upending of how our economies and societies have traditionally functioned. At the heart of this shift was the unprecedented adoption of technology, particularly in emerging markets. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us to reshape our economies around innovation and entrepreneurship and prime our societies for decades of positive growth.”
According to reports, Nuwa Capital has already struck a deal with a fourth startup and the details will be in the public domain shortly. The platform is also believed to be in advanced talks with several other startups from across MENA.
