Best seed cheques of the Middle East
The best early bets by tech investors in the region
Good morning,
Leap wraps up today after four busy days filled with announcements. I might cover some of them in the next few issues of Termsheet. Just waiting to see if they saved the best for last.
From what I’ve heard, this year’s edition has been a big improvement. Attendees say it was better organized, had smoother access, smaller crowds than 2024 (not sure if that was by design), and no parking headaches.
Pulling off an event of this scale isn’t easy, with so many moving parts, so it’s great to see that the organizers took feedback seriously and made improvements.
One of the first tech events I attended was Wamda’s Mix n’ Mentor in Riyadh. It was small, well-organized, and incredibly effective. The format ensured that everyone walked away with something valuable; networking, insights, or mentorship.
The charm was in its simplicity. A handful of attendees, structured mentoring sessions, and organic conversations. There might have been a fireside chat or two, but the real focus was on engagement, not spectacle.
Tech events in the region have since grown, with governments or their affiliates and partners hosting many of them. But as they’ve scaled, they’ve also become overwhelming for a lot of attendees. The intimacy is gone.
That said, large-scale events have their place. They shine a spotlight on the country and its tech ecosystem, creating opportunities, as seen with Web Summit and its impact on Portugal’s startup scene.
But beyond the headlines and hype, what really makes these events special is simple: the people. The best part is still the conversations, the chance encounters, and the energy of having so many familiar faces in one place.
Now to the piece.
In early 2012, Barry Eggers, the co-founder and Partner at Lightspeed, learned about Snapchat from his daughter, who told him that high school kids were using just three apps: Angry Birds, Instagram, and Snapchat.
He knew about the first two, but it was the first time he had heard about Snapchat. Seeing his children and their friends fixated on it, the Lightspeed investor figured there was something big at play.
He told his partner Jeremy Liew about it, who started looking into who was behind the app. At the time, Snapchat had fewer than 100,000 installs. After some dead ends, Jeremy’s search led to Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel at Stanford. Through the alumni network, he connected with Spiegel and invited him to Lightspeed's office.
The Snapchat founder pitched his vision for the platform as a place for sharing authentic, private moments; unlike Facebook's public, curated nature.
Despite low download numbers, the app showed strong user engagement. Ten days later, Lightspeed invested $485,000 in what would become one of the best seed-stage deals of all time, while Spiegel was still a Stanford student.
(Lightspeed continued investing in later rounds, bringing its total investment to $8.1 million. At the time of Snap’s IPO, its stake was worth around $2 billion).
Other iconic seed investments include Sequoia’s bet on Dropbox, First Round Capital’s early investment in Uber (though it was the first institutional round, not exactly seed), and Earlybird’s backing of UiPath.
Sequoia’s investment in WhatsApp and Accel’s in Facebook also rank among the best early-stage bets, but they weren’t seed rounds.
In this piece, I want to identify the best seed cheques of all time in the Middle East & North Africa. The region’s ecosystem is still young, but a few deals have already delivered outstanding returns for investors.
Of course, nothing on the scale of Snap, Dropbox, Uber, or UiPath, but still home runs in their own right.
To do this, I’ll rely on two key datasets, along with additional insights:
The highest-valued companies are relevant because, in some cases, there have been secondary share sales. In others, we might just look at future potential, if nothing else.
I have also spoken to people close to some of the companies and deals being discussed to gather historical valuations and estimate returns. A small part of the numbers presented here are not publicly available and, as far as I can tell, are being shared for the first time.
Some of these numbers are based on estimates so they may not be perfectly accurate.
(I have previously also covered some of the fund returners of the region in another piece.)