BECO’s Investment Manifesto

We are sector-agnostic across all funds, but have sectors of interest that we are currently excited about.

Early Stage (Fund IV): Pre-seed to Series A

High conviction areas include:

• Proptech & Construction Tech: A region undergoing once-in-a-generation buildout. We see meaningful opportunity created by regulatory modernization, digitization, and the scale of new development in the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
• Fintech: Especially in categories with large customer pain points, weak incumbents, and poor NPS – including consumer lending, SME lending, embedded finance, and new value-transfer mechanisms. The Gulf’s digitized financial infrastructure is creating conditions for efficient underwriting and rapid scaling.
• Retail Tech / Omnichannel Consumer Brands: Tech-first brands and platforms that integrate online and offline experiences in large, underserved markets. We are particularly drawn to models where supply chain, demand forecasting, production, and distribution can be fundamentally rearchitected through data and AI in large consumer white spaces.
  
• AI (Application Layer): AI applications and AI-native services solving painful, high-frequency workflows, such as the automation of “middle tasks” for highly paid professionals, and Service-as-a-Software models where services scale like software. We seek teams who astutely understand their defensibility and the quality and durability of revenue in a world where models commoditize quickly. We’re excited by teams building with context-rich data (including local nuance), moving with extreme speed of execution and iteration, and showing virality or best-in-class product-led growth. More in Part 4 of our AI Thesis (2025 edition).

Growth-Stage (Growth Fund I): Series B to Pre-IPO

Fully sector-agnostic, we invest when there is demonstrable product-market fit and strong unit economics (profitable or close to profitability). Our strategy is to partner with startups to accelerate growth within their validated core markets and products, underwriting only validated, sustainable, and high-velocity scaling.

Business Models

In both our early-stage and growth-stage strategies, we look for business models that combine several key characteristics. The most compelling models tend to exhibit all or most of these factors, as they enable and compound each other’s impact. 

Capital Efficiency

We seek out capital-efficient business models, excited by those that can achieve a 10:1 Enterprise Value (EV) to total funds raised ratio and beyond once they reach scale.

Early-stage companies may begin below this threshold, but we need to see a credible path toward improving efficiency over time. Some of our early-stage investments started with a ratio as low as 3:1 and eventually scaled to generate returns as high as 25:1.

Does every incremental dollar of capital produce compounding value? If the answer is yes, and the model is structurally designed to improve with scale, we want to understand it.

Moats

We lean into business models where advantages strengthen as they scale, and where a meaningful amount of every extra dollar of revenue drops to the bottom line. In the Gulf, this often comes from a combination of the speed at which a team executes, hyper-localization defending against both local and global competition, continuously increasing quality data, and relationships and regulatory pathways built long before the market catches up.

A moat may begin with culture – a team that moves with extreme clarity and pace and that obsesses over product and customer experience. It may grow from the data the company earns through its fast feedback loops, or from an operating model where AI enhances every aspect of the business, from underwriting to service delivery. This results in good decisions being made at a growing frequency, the effects of which compound daily.

White Spaces

Being too early is expensive. Being too late and operating in a crowded competitive market is also expensive. The best companies in the region were not built when the opportunity was obvious; they were built when the right signals were visible to those paying close attention. 

We look for founders who deeply understand the dynamics of the space they are entering, beyond simple metrics such as market size, to more nuanced aspects such as the sequence of conditions that must shift before adoption takes hold. Sometimes that’s a regulatory change. Sometimes it’s infrastructure. Sometimes it’s the emergence of a new behavior or distribution channel.

We often ask ourselves: How many things need to change before this category unlocks meaningful traction and how close are we to those changes actually happening? Is it three things or is it twenty? Are we 1-3 years away or 5-8 years away?

Small is the new badge of honor

The modern measure of success is efficiency: small, intelligently assembled AI-native teams achieving substantial, recurring, high-quality revenue with minimal to no marketing spend, and generating high revenue per FTE. We look for businesses built with AI-native org charts, leveraging orchestrating agents and recruiting people who lean heavily towards AI-assisted building, editing logic, and fast research.

We are drawn to companies where the economics reflect this shift – where a handful of people can produce work that historically required entire departments, and where high-margin, recurring revenue grows faster than headcount. These teams have built speed into their architecture, shipping relentlessly, learning quickly, and using every iteration to widen the gap between themselves and slower competitors.

Founders

Last but not least, we back an exceptional breed of founders whom we call “Original Thinkers”. They see the world differently, through a lens shaped by original insight rather than consensus. They are strategic enough to understand the long arc of the business and operational enough to build the first version with their own hands. They toggle easily between zooming out and zooming in without losing their footing.

What sets them apart is their internal drive. They have an insatiable ambition that comes from within; a combination of curiosity, urgency, and a need to prove something to themselves. They are in a hurry to achieve many things, yet they are masterful at prioritizing their time. They stay close to the details without losing sight of direction. They welcome challenge because they are in constant pursuit of evolution, progress, and excellence. And they evolve fast, letting go of ideas that no longer serve them while doubling down on those that do. When aligned, our role as investors and partners is to add leverage, momentum, conviction, and perspective; our best founders own the direction.

They have depth and understand the many facets involved in building a business and what makes the commercial proposition compelling. They know how to build a company, hire, fire, grow, and shape an organization that is lean, efficient, and capable of delivering on plan. Most importantly, they have a strong grasp and conviction in building  companies efficiently with the best technology available. Today, that is building with the newest and best AI tools to scale more efficiently with less headcount.

They are gifted communicators, able to clearly articulate their vision, the path to building it, and the constraints they face. This clarity attracts people who could work anywhere but choose to work with them, as well as investors and other stakeholders who are essential to fulfilling the journey.