Venture Capitalists Want the Middle East’s Money

Eight thousand miles is a long way to go for a networking event, but desperate times call for desperate measures. That may explain the horde of tech investors who piled into the Four Seasons Hotel in Abu Dhabi’s Al Maryah Island on the evening of Nov. 18. They were attending a reception hosted by Mubadala Investment Company, a $284 billion wealth fund run by the government of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates that’s plowed billions into SoftBank’s Vision Fund, among other startup backers. 

The U.S. venture capitalists who showed up from Palo Alto, Manhattan and other locales may have had a whiff of desperation about them. They’ve been suffering through a far more challenging fundraising environment than in recent years. Blame the bear market in stocks. The U.S. pensions and endowments that back venture funds have found themselves overexposed to private equity and venture capital investments as equities tanked, giving those limited partners far less ammo to invest in new VC funds. 

To some of those U.S. fund managers, the wealthy Persian Gulf investors seem like the perfect antidote. Rising oil prices mean the Middle East’s sovereign wealth funds have more than $3 trillion at their disposal, according to sovereign wealth fund tracker Global SWF. U.S. investors hope that money will help them maintain the pace of fundraising and the supersized funds they grew accustomed to during the bull market.