What do you get when capital abundance, regulatory innovation, and top environmental stakes converge?
Whilst project capital investment is suffering to get better in lots of world areas, the Center East and North Africa (MENA) area’s VC business posted document highs for 2025.
The area stays a web importer of meals and very susceptible to local weather trade occasions like excessive warmth, emerging sea ranges, and water shortage. (MENA is house to six.3% of the worldwide inhabitants however holds simply 1.4% of worldwide freshwater, as an example.)
Those elements necessitate innovation that might later function a blueprint for different areas going through local weather demanding situations.
In the meantime, geopolitical occasions, together with Covid-19 and the Ukraine Warfare, have increased meals safety to a countrywide precedence similar to power safety, with specific targets to extend output in countries’ 10-, 20-, and 30-year imaginative and prescient plans, together with:
Tech and infrastructure indicators in MENA
Sovereign wealth price range are a foundational element of MENA’s monetary panorama. They function on a distinct time-frame than conventional project capital—10 to twenty years as opposed to 5 to 7—and concentrate on strategic worth over purely monetary returns. This allows decades-long R&D cycles and infrastructure-scale investments in applied sciences that inherently take longer to broaden. Suppose quantum computing, blank energy, and vertical farming infrastructure.
Since 2023, sovereign price range within the area have pumped masses of billions of this “patient” capital into AI and tech, with a focal point on home deployment.
The UAE has made explicit strides in AI infrastructure.
Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund PIF is projected to take a position a whopping $2 trillion through 2030, unrivaled within the area, in step with Gaia. Different investments come with:
$40 billion earmarked for an AI fund
$100 billion for complicated production by the use of the Alat initiative
Greater than $500 billion into the NEOM good towns undertaking, together with The Line city building undertaking.
Each initiatives deal with the area’s local weather vulnerabilities and ongoing want for sources. NEOM and The Line come with projects round water control and blank energy to satisfy the predicted 50% surge in call for.
In other places, Qatar has a $1 billion funds for quantum computing R&D in its nationwide technique and the area’s first quantum lab. Egypt holds an lively startup ecosystem, a big home marketplace with its 120-million-strong inhabitants, and a pathway for startups to get admission to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) area, which contains Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.
Regulatory innovation as a aggressive benefit
A number of of the area’s countries have demonstrated a quicker, extra complete regulatory pathway for brand spanking new applied sciences than different portions of the arena. Those tendencies may just place MENA as a significant world competitor in spaces like novel meals and vitamin. Examples come with:
Abu Dhabi is creating a regulatory framework for novel meals that reduces the registration duration to simply six to 9 months as opposed to 18 to 36 months in the USA and EU. It’ll additionally consolidate registration for brand spanking new meals merchandise, halal certification, and manufacturing/import lets in, thus accelerating marketplace access.
It has additionally up to date its halal certification procedure to align with world requirements, strengthening export competitiveness within the Muslim shopper marketplace, estimated at 1.8 billion folks.
Qatar is the second one nation on the earth to approve the sale of cultivated meat following its funding and production plans into Devour Simply’s GOOD Meat, the place it led the corporate’s $200 million spherical.
The UAE has a number of regulatory sandboxes that permit for speedy building and “an agile regulatory environment” for brand spanking new applied sciences comparable to AI.
Consistent with world well being developments, Saudi Arabia presented new rules round meals transparency, together with front-of-pack labeling and calorie disclosures on menus.
The area’s gene-editing panorama is changing into an increasing number of aggressive through adopting versatile, product-based frameworks that align extra intently with the permissive US style than the historically restrictive EU requirements, fostering a quicker trail to commercialization for non-transgenic inventions.
By means of the numbers:
Of the $153.73 billion in overall project capital funding in MENA between 2015 and 2025, simply over 5% went to agrifoodtech at just about $3 billion. This proportion of GDP is on par with world ranges, although not up to the business’s 13% contribution to regional GDP.
The next firms be offering a snapshot of main regional agrifoodtech firms to-date through price range raised and most powerful classes:
Kitopi: raised $800+ million (greatest go out candidate, cloud kitchens)
Natural Harvest: $330 million (vertical farming infrastructure)
Obtained Pink Sea Farms in 2023 for its saltwater agriculture innovation
Nana: $210 million (eGrocery regional chief)
Foodics: $200 million (eating place SaaS)
Agrifoodtech startups raised 22% extra in investment in 2025, albeit over fewer offers than in earlier years. But the cut up through classes tells us little of the area’s possible as defined above. In 2026, the query is whether or not the above tendencies and targets will probably be mirrored in MENA’s VC investment totals.
Supply: AgFunder
