When Sophie Smith was raising a seed round for Nabta Health in 2021, she ran into a problem familiar to many early-stage founders. She wanted angel investors, but the tickets on offer were often too large. So Smith did what founders tend to do when the obvious solution doesn’t exist: she built one.
She set up a special purpose vehicle that allowed investors to put in as little as $1,000. Then, frustrated by the lack of publicly available lists of female angel investors in the region, she and a group of friends decided to create one themselves. They called it 2022 Female Angels, with the slightly ambitious goal of identifying 2,022 female angel investors across the region.
Today the initiative manages a list of around 350 active angel investors, 44 of whom are women. Nabta has since raised $4.5m, including a $2m pre-Series A round.
It’s an example of a much bigger problem facing female founders across the Middle East and North Africa. More women are starting businesses, but the money isn’t following at anything like the same pace.
MENA startups raised $1.7bn across 242 VC rounds in the first half of 2026, according to Wamda. Female-founded startups received just $2.5m of that, or 0.14% of the total. Male-founded startups, by comparison, raised $1.6bn across 213 deals.
This does not appear to be a blip. Between 2019 and 2025, female-founded and mixed-gender teams accounted for less than 4% of equity transactions across the GCC.
The numbers look even stranger when you consider what’s happening at the other end of the funnel. According to a 2025 GoDaddy survey, 51% of surveyed small businesses in MENA are owned by women, with 63% of those businesses founded in the previous five years. Abu Dhabi alone issued 3,058 new business licences to Emirati women in the first half of 2026.
There are more female founders and more female-owned businesses, but when it comes to venture capital something is getting lost along the way.
Part of the problem may be who is doing the investing. Lucy Chow, an LP at Pact VC whose investment remit covers MENA, says Gulf investor networks are still heavily male dominated, particularly at decision-making level. That matters because deal flow follows networks: the people in the room influence who gets introduced, who gets considered and, ultimately, who gets funded.
Data from Founders Forum Group suggests a similar pattern elsewhere. VC firms with at least one female partner were 2.3 times more likely to invest in female founders, while firms where women made up at least 30% of partners invested 4.7 times more in female-founded companies than all-male firms.
There’s another problem too: exits. The region has relatively few major female-founded startup exits, creating a familiar chicken-and-egg situation. Investors want to see successful female founders before committing capital, but founders need capital to create those success stories in the first place.
So women are getting creative. Some are bootstrapping, while others are relying on side hustles, personal income or public innovation grants to bridge the gaps between funding rounds. For founders trying to build companies capable of scaling, however, those sources can only take them so far.
This is why Smith’s approach with Nabta is interesting. Rather than waiting for the existing funding ecosystem to change, she helped build another route into it, bringing more angel investors into the market and making it possible for people to invest smaller amounts.
The region doesn’t appear to have a shortage of women willing to start companies. The more difficult question is whether its capital markets are keeping pace with them.
