Dr. Bilal Baloch discusses AI investments, value creation, and global growth strategies for founders, focusing on Shorooq's unique private fund strategy.
Dr. Bilal Baloch discusses AI investments, value creation, and global growth strategies for founders, focusing on Shorooq's unique private fund strategy in Abu Dhabi and early-stage AI investing. The episode covers topics like disrupting consulting with AI, global AI innovation, and founder's sales secrets.
And I come in much earlier um at the pre-seed seed stage. And what that enables us to do is not just invest, but say to founders that look um AI is global from day one. You should be thinking not just about your home market, um but also other markets of interest where your product and your technology can flourish. And the Middle East and South Asia and North Africa is one of those regions. Right? You have hundreds of millions of people, most of them are between 18 and 35. Uh there are institutions and customers ready and waiting to leverage your technology, and we can open that market for you, certainly help to do it. The second is access to growth capital. 40% of my LPs do co-investments with us. If we invest in you at the pre-seed seed stage, there will come a time where you will want to raise much bigger rounds and get in much bigger checks and and get more sophisticated global
capital into your cap table. We can help facilitate those conversations because we are a trusted partner of those funds and entities. And then the third is is uh access to architecture like um compute and talent that uh arguably today outside of the US and China uh the UAE and and the region specifically is the third rail on AI. And that kind of access, regulatory, compute, and others is very important for AI founders building today, especially if they're building in ecosystems where regulation has not been so favorable.