McKinsey Report: MENAP’s Entrepreneurial Ecosystem (2023)

According to McKinsey’s July 2023 report “Is MENAP’s budding start-up ecosystem ready to blossom?”, the Middle East, North Africa, and Pakistan (MENAP) region, including the UAE, is showing encouraging signs of growth in its entrepreneurial landscape. The report highlights several key findings relevant to Abu Dhabi’s business environment:

• Annual venture capital funding in the MENAP region has grown five times since 2017, reaching $3.45 billion in 2022
• The UAE attracts the lion’s share of regional funding at 34%, with Saudi Arabia following at 29%
• The UAE’s average deal size in 2021 was $7.7 million, almost double that of other major markets in the region
• The UAE and Saudi Arabia alone have allocated more than $11 billion and $5.7 billion, respectively, across 15 funds to deploy in the region and abroad