While the show is an effort to spotlight the UAE’s young and promising entrepreneurs, they still face high barriers compared to some of their counterparts elsewhere in the world, local investors say.
“The entrepreneurial spirit and energy is certainly there with young and old budding entrepreneurs,” Adnan Haider, chief executive of Regal Group AG, the first company in the Middle East to receive a crypto trading license, told CNBC. However, he said, the UAE scene has three primary issues holding it back.
The CEO described these as “limited funding resources, limited visionaries to think about global impact solutions or scaleability of their respective businesses, and general lack of polishing when presenting to the investor community.”
“Some of the business ideas were neat, but were neither able to address key business risks nor financial investment highlights to make it attractive for funders,” he said.
Locally-based investors say there are “only a handful” of venture capital (VC) firms in the area, and that there is so little competition between them that funding offers for start-ups are able to remain fairly low.
Parmar, one of the show’s successful contenders, disputed the lack of money claim, but noted a mindset still firmly anchored to traditional investing.
“Actually there is a lot of money, it’s just that the mindset hasn’t set in yet to go into the VC world,” he said. “Investors are more real estate-focused or more traditional, as opposed to going into VC where the risk is quite a bit higher. So what you need to do is convince investors — who do have the capital, by the way — that your idea is the next best thing.”
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