BECO backs founders from inception to growth and, at the very earliest stage, that can mean pre-revenue, pre-product and, sometimes, pre-team. What matters most is the founding team’s ability to spot patterns and adjacencies in fragmented markets that others overlook, adapt quickly to shifting market dynamics (especially with regional nuance), and the ability to attract talent, partners, and investors.
At the 2026 edition of Qatar Web Summit, we demonstrated just how early we’re willing to invest. BECO, Silicon Badia and Infinity Constellation (a spin off from Invisible Technologies) announced a partnership to incubate an AI-native services company for the GCC, marking BECO’s first incubation. We brought together partners with complementary capabilities. We recruited top-tier operational talent with global and regional scaling experience.
The company currently operates in stealth, building human-in-the-loop AI products that automate existing workflows while enabling entirely new categories of work previously too complex to execute at scale. This aligns with Part IV of our AI thesis published last year. After nearly a year of searching for the right founder building in this space, we chose to incubate after the right combination of founding talent and strategic partners came together. We’re building with meaningful ownership and deep alignment from day zero.
This sits at the earliest stage of pre-seed investing, yet the principles remain consistent with how we’ve always approached early-stage companies.
We prefer to get to know founders and learn their way of thinking early, when their idea is taking shape and at times before they’ve even started building.
This is how we work systematically at the pre-seed stage. We help shape thinking, adding value before there’s anything in it for us, and building the intellectual trust and values alignment required for a partnership that lasts decades. When founders decide to raise, we’re already aligned on the opportunity and how to execute against it.
We have made several pre-seed investments across our portfolio, backing founders with deep domain expertise, a clear vision for building in non-obvious spaces, and strong alignment with us on how enduring companies should be built. Pre-seed, in our view, spans a spectrum. At one end are teams with a well-formed idea and little more than a few slides. At the other are founders who have already built an initial product but are still pre-traction and yet to scale. In both cases, our focus is less on metrics and more on conviction, insight, and founder-market fit.
When we partnered with ClearGrid, leading their pre-seed round, they had conviction on a problem hiding in plain sight. Consumer debt collection across the Gulf was broken, with opaque processes, unpleasant borrower experiences, and inefficient recovery rates. In addition, the rapid rise of BNPL platforms is growing the consumer lending market. Rapidly developing regionally-nuanced models, and leveraging AI tools like voice calling, created the technical conditions for a new approach to a traditionally human-heavy and low-NPS service.
ClearGrid built a debt collection infrastructure platform that beats traditional recovery rates by over 50% in some segments, powered by context-rich regional data and a capital-efficient model. We’d known co-founder and CEO Mohammad Al Zaben for many years, well before his days building MUNCH:ON, which Careem acquired. We stayed in touch, working with him through his ideas on what came next. When he returned with a sharp vision for ClearGrid, we backed him from day one, when he had just a few slides and nothing more.
Edward (Ed) Sabbagh and Amine Mamlouk from Trofee came to us with a thesis about live shopping in the Middle East. We had known Amine for several months prior, having spent time with him at our office as he explored and refined what he wanted to build next. He ultimately partnered with Ed, whose references were consistently strong. While their initial beachhead focused on live shopping across TCG/collectibles and fashion, their ambition was broader: to build a model that meaningfully shifts power and economics back to sellers, while creating a more interactive, entertainment-driven purchasing experience for buyers, addressing a clear whitespace in the region.
Despite our general skepticism toward pure e-commerce models, we had a strong appreciation for the collectibles category; some of the BECO team are collectors, giving us firsthand appreciation for the excitement and community dynamics that drive the space. What ultimately stood out, however, was the clarity of their perspective and the strength of their founder-market fit.
Ed spent eight years at Farfetch, serving as Global Chief Marketplace Officer, and developed deep marketplace expertise alongside genuine conviction in the collectibles space. Amine previously served as Chief of Staff and Technical Advisor to the CEO of Souq.com, later becoming GM where he launched, scaled, and led multiple business verticals for Amazon in MENA. The pairing of Ed’s domain depth with Amine’s operational rigor created a highly complementary founding team.
We co-led Trofee’s pre-seed round, closing the investment over a long public holiday in Dubai, a reflection of the mutual conviction and momentum around the opportunity. Since launch, the company has established itself as a leader in the collectibles segment, scaling to millions in GMV within five months while maintaining a disciplined, capital-efficient approach to growth.
In each case, what mattered was the quality of the insight, the founder’s ability to articulate why the Gulf created specific advantages for their business, and their track record of execution.
If you’re curious to learn more about how, why and when we invest, please read our Manifesto to understand our full criteria and approach.