GCC fund managers have no shortage of capital to place. The harder question is what deserves it. One Stride Ventures report puts GCC venture capital funding at about $3.3 billion across 541 deals in 2025, up 14 percent on the year. Saudi Arabia and the UAE took most of that total.

Hasnae Taleb has a method for sorting it. She is managing partner at Mintiply Capital and GCC partner at Fuel Venture Capital. In an interview with ICN Business, she set out how she reads a startup, a sector, and a crisis. One thread runs through all three. Ignore the story. Follow the money.

For asset classes, I look at liquidity, duration, collateral quality, supply and sensitivity to policy. I spend more time watching funding costs, currencies, sovereign spreads, deposit movements, freight rates and insurance markets than watching the daily headlines. These indicators often reveal where the pressure is building and where capital is beginning to seek protection. During the first stage of a crisis, capital usually values access and liquidity. The larger return opportunities often appear later, once the market begins repricing the beneficiaries of the new environment.

Most GCC fund managers hear the regional growth story in every deck. Taleb takes it out and studies what is left. Who pays for this product today? Why do they pay? How often do they come back? What happens to revenue if subsidies fade or the state becomes a pickier buyer? The GCC startups she wants to back have built an edge of their own. That edge might be regulatory access, data nobody else holds, distribution, deep ties with customers, better economics, or a product clients would struggle to replace.

Founder behaviour matters too. Taleb watches how a team acts when money is easy to raise. Disciplined founders can explain the purpose of each round, what each dollar is expected to deliver, and which assumptions are still open. Strip the expansion story away, and the business still has to add up.

The sector GCC fund managers still underrate

Asked where the region undervalues its own potential, Taleb points to industrial technology. She means robots, sensors, automation and business software for the water, energy, manufacturing, construction and logistics sectors. The GCC runs some of the largest physical assets anywhere, in some of the toughest operating conditions. Trim maintenance, downtime, inventory, or energy costs by a small margin on assets that size, and the savings run into millions.

The GCC has some of the world’s largest physical assets and some of the most complex operating environments. Thatcreates an exceptional place to build and testtechnology with real economic value. A smallimprovement in downtime, energy use, maintenanceor inventory management can translate into millions ofdollars. Before writing a cheque, I would want to seea clearly defined operating problem, a customer whohas already paid and measurable financial results.

Her pre-investment checklist is short. An operating problem she can state in one sentence. A customer who has paid real money, not a prospect. Results she can measure in dollars. Then she looks at rollout: how many months a deployment takes, how much custom work each client needs, and whether margins rise with every new sale. One pilot inside a big institution is only a start. The company passes when private buyers keep signing, and the product eventually sells beyond the region.

For GCC fund managers, tighter discipline has made the market healthier, in her view. The last cycle let companies raise at rich valuations before the numbers earned it. Investors now press on cash burn, governance, margins and the path to scale, while founders think harder about dilution, the ownership they give up each round. Her worry is overcorrection. Venture investing means committing to a big idea while much of the proof is still missing. Early-stage funding dries up when a committee expects a seed-stage company to show what a mature buyout would. She still backs ambitious founders, provided they know the risks they take, what those risks cost, and which evidence will show if the plan holds.

Where money goes when a crisis hits

Taleb’s crisis method starts with a diagnosis. Is the shock about liquidity, inflation, the currency, solvency, a rule change, or a geopolitical event? Each one forces a different set of people to act. The next step is to find them: the sellers with no choice, the borrowers scrambling for dollars, the institutions with bills due now. She also looks for the markets deep enough to take large capital flows without the price lurching.

For countries, she checks currency stability and convertibility (whether the money can be freely exchanged), the safety of custody, banking depth, the courts, political risk, and how easily money can leave. Assets get a similar test: how fast they sell, how long the money is tied up, whether they work as collateral, and how hard a policy shift would hit the price. She watches borrowing costs, currency moves, sovereign spreads (the extra yield investors demand to hold a government’s debt), deposit flows, shipping rates, and insurance prices. The news feed comes second. Those signals show where pressure is building before the headlines do.

Early in a crisis, money wants two things: to stay accessible and to stay liquid. That is the stage when safe haven assets, gold and the dollar being the usual examples, get crowded. The larger gains tend to arrive later, once markets work out who benefits from the new conditions and reprice them. GCC fund managers who track the early signals see the move forming. Taleb reads where the money is heading, and she reads it before the crowd.