VENTURING BEYOND CAPITAL

In just seven years, Shane Shin and Mahmoud Adi, Founding Partners of Shoroog Partners, have turned their startup into one of the Middle East’s biggest startup investors, with 500 million in assets under management. With ambitions far beyond venture capital, they’re now expanding further into credit markets and looking at where they can be pioneers.

- CLAUDINE COLETTI

When Mahmoud Adi and Shane Shin found themselves on the same team in Silicon Valley 10 years ago, it was a fortuitous meeting of minds. Shin had been born and raised in South Korea, studied in Canada, and worked in New York before heading to the Valley to work for the Mubadala-backed chipmaker Global Foundries. Emirati Adi had arrived at Global Foundries with Mubadala one week before, having moved from his home in Abu Dhabi to study at Stanford Business School. As the pair got to know each other it became clear that while their backgrounds were very different, their ambitions were aligned, and their vision for the future began to form.

Three years later, in 2017, Adi and Shin founded alternative investments manager Shorooq Partners in the U.A.E. Having started with a team of two, a shared dream, and no office, in seven years the company has grown its assets under management from $2 million to around $500 million. Today, it has offices in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and South Korea, with plans to expand into Qatar, and a regional team of around 30 people. Among its 82 portfolio companies are Saudi fintech unicorn Tamara, Egyptian e-grocery platform Breadfast, and U.A.E-based agritech Pure Harvest, of which Adi is also a cofounder. Shorooq's investors include Abu Dhabi's Mubadala, Bahrain's AI Waha Fund of Funds, Lunate, and Saudi Arabia's Jada Fund of Funds Company.