The investment firm of one of Saudi Arabia’s richest women is upping bets on female-led businesses, helping to plug a gender financing gap in the male-dominated region.
Dara Holdings, the family office of billionaire Lubna Olayan, has made a series of investments since mid-2024 in United Arab Emirates-based startups founded by women. Her firm participated in a $10 million seed funding round disclosed this month for qeen.ai, a Dubai-based artificial intelligence startup co-founded by former Google executive Dina Alsamhan.
That followed Dara’s initial preseed investment in a June round that raised $2.2 million.
“Grateful and proud,” Alsamhan, Google’s former head of Saudi Arabia, said in a LinkedIn post this month on qeen.ai’s latest fundraising, one of the biggest-ever seed rounds in the Middle East and North Africa region.
In December, Dara took part in a $5.5 million capital raise for BioSapien, an Abu Dhabi-based drug delivery platform founded by physician Khatija Ali, whom Silicon Valley investor Tim Draper featured on his startup competition web series, “Meet the Drapers,” last month. Before that, the family office also invested in the second fund raised by Systemiq Capital, a climate-tech venture firm led by former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. commodities banker Irena Spazzapan.
The family office plans to continue making investments that empower women in the Middle East and is supporting the establishment of a social-impact fund at Alfanar, a UK-registered charity that Olayan, 69, helps lead, said Dara Chief Investment Officer Walid Haram.
“If an investment ticks the boxes, and it supports women in the region, that for us is a big additional plus,” Haram, 44, said in a statement. “It’s a big focus.”
The moves add to Olayan’s status as one of the most influential businesswomen in the Middle East, where female-founded ventures account for less than 7% of funded startups and received 1.2% of total funding last year, according to Wamda, a platform that encourages entrepreneurship in the region.
The former JPMorgan Chase & Co. analyst is a principal of Olayan Group, a multibillion-dollar international conglomerate founded by her father in 1947 that she owns alongside members of her family. She served for decades as CEO of its Middle East holding company, Olayan Financing Co., until stepping down in 2019. She now chairs its executive committee and also leads the board of directors for Riyadh-based lender Saudi Awwal Bank.
Dara Holdings set up UK and Cyprus branches after Olayan’s retirement as CEO of OFC. Its other holdings include a stake in Italian confectionery business Venchi and Veir, a U.S. power-transmission startup that it acquired a stake in last month.
Olayan, a trustee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is boosting her focus on female leaders as women increasingly play a larger role in her native Saudi Arabia, partly through recent reforms that allowed them to set up businesses without male consent and travel independently. Progress for women has already boosted the country’s GDP by about 12%, according to research from Capital Economics.
“We are very keen on creating an investment climate that focuses on R&D and entrepreneurship,” said Haram, who declined to disclose Dara’s assets under management. “We want to create these opportunities in the region.”
Women are also wielding more influence in the family office sector. They now hold senior positions at the private investment firms of more than two dozen of the world’s 500 richest billionaires, including U.S. tech entrepreneur Michael Dell and Britain’s wealthiest person, James Dyson, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Other megarich women who’ve recently set up family offices include Alannah Weston, the former chair of the luxury department store Selfridges; and Demet Mutlu, a Harvard Business School dropout who built Turkey’s biggest e-commerce platform.