MENA Moonshots: Early-stage investment to support start-ups

Lindsay Miller is the Managing Partner and Board Director of MENA Moonshots, a boutique early-stage investor that offers funding, strategy design, and direct operational support to start-ups and founders in Dubai and around the world.

During her first 11 years in Dubai, Lindsay worked closely with and helped several entrepreneurs and creatives. She saw how much receiving financial and operational support helped unleash the potential of people trying to build their businesses. Lindsay saw a gap in the market of early-stage investing, and when her business partner proposed to take a more structured approach to supporting founders, they decided to start MENA Moonshots in 2018.

With the later addition of one more partner to the team, MENA Moonshots spent two years testing the waters with relatively smaller investments. “In early-stage investing, there are some investors and founders who are really looking for a very fast journey, very high growth. We were looking for founders that we could have a long-term partnership with,” Lindsay told Euronews.

They found such founders in Sineo Packaging, which offers sustainable packaging solutions for the retail, food & beverage, and e-commerce industries. When the founders, Antoine Moussali and David Fahmy reached out to Lindsay and her partners, they were impressed by the company’s mission and the track record overseas, and subsequently invested in them and helped with introductions to the market in Dubai.

As they kept investing more, Lindsay and her partners were approached by more founders and companies. Joi Gifts, headed by the CEO, Rami Kahale, is an online gifting platform operating across the Middle East. The scalability of their business was one of the key aspects to MENA