The character of a firm is settled long before its first deal. About Investmate — a Riyadh-based venture-creation and investment partner for Saudi Arabia and the GCC.
A house is not its strategy — it is the people who carry it, the judgement they bring and the lines they will not cross.
We started from a standard, not a gap in the market.
Investmate did not begin with a fund to deploy. It began with a discomfort.
Serious money still moves through rooms where no one will be named when it goes wrong — and the counsel that steers it rarely comes from anyone who shares the downside. We built the firm that is answerable: its name on the table is a statement of judgement, brought in when the decision is hard and the stakes are real.
That is a higher bar than the work demands. We set it on purpose — and everything that follows here, the people we keep, the work we refuse, the way we govern ourselves, exists to clear it.
Four convictions we don’t apologise for.
A philosophy is only worth stating if it costs you something. These are the views that decide what we chase and what we decline — and we will let them lose us deals.
We will hold a position through the quarters it looks wrong.
The most valuable positions look wrong for a while; by the time a thesis is comfortable, the return has been priced out of it. We hold a view through the quarters it looks mistaken, and we pass the moment it becomes obvious to everyone.
A view we would not defend when it costs us is not a view.
Advice is cheap precisely because no one has to live with it. We take positions we are willing to be wrong about in public, and we accept the verdict when we are.
The compounding happens in the years others cannot sit through.
Real companies are built on a timeline that does not fit a fund cycle, and most of the value goes to the people who are not in a hurry. We are structured to stay through the quiet years between the headline and the result, when the impatient have already moved on.
We trust ourselves to know when each side is wrong.
We hold the Kingdom’s ambitions to a global bar and global capital to local reality — and we trust ourselves to know when each is wrong. That calibration is rarer than either half alone.
Senior enough to decide. Few enough to be known.
Everything above is only as good as the people held to it. We keep the bench small and senior on purpose — each person owns the outcomes they touch, and nothing important is delegated to someone you would never meet. Profiles follow as each appointment is confirmed.
Mohamed AlShaeq
Executive Chairman
Saeed Halabi
Managing Director
Cameron Usher
Investments Director
The wider team, by function
Profile to follow
Investment & Capital
- Investment Committee
- Fundraising & Investor Relations
Network & Origination
- Origination
- Strategic Partnerships
Ventures
- Venture Building
- Portfolio Operations
Registry & Shared Services
- Company Registration & Setup
- Market-Entry Knowledge
The lines we hold — especially when they cost us.
A firm’s character shows in its restraints, not its ambitions. These are the lines we hold when holding them is inconvenient — and especially when it costs us a deal.
We say no, often.
We decline mandates we cannot add real conviction to, and we end ones we stop believing in rather than bill them to the finish. A short engagement we’d take again beats a long one we wouldn’t.
We don’t broker what we don’t believe.
An introduction is a transfer of our credibility. We make it only when both sides are better for it and we would stake our own standing on the outcome — never to fill a pipeline.
We don’t outgrow our judgement.
Scale is not a strategy. We will refuse growth that puts a company we are accountable for beyond the reach of the people who vouched for it.
We don’t disappear after the deal.
The cheque is the start of the obligation, not the end of it. We are judged by where companies stand years later — so we stay close long after it stops being convenient.
Trust is engineered, not asserted.
Character is only worth anything if it holds under weight. Operating across advice, fundraising and building, our governance is written, independent and enforceable — the structure a founder, an investor or a family office is entitled to see before they rely on us.
Investment committee, independent of origination.
Capital decisions are made on the merits by a committee with its own authority, independent of the relationships that sourced the deal. No fee can override a considered no.
Declared, recorded, fixed in advance.
Where interests could diverge, the conflict is declared, recorded and managed on terms fixed in advance. Where it cannot be cleanly managed, we step back.
Paid on outcomes, not on closing.
We are paid for where things end up, not for closing them — so our incentives sit on the same side of the table as the people who rely on us.
A named owner on every decision.
Every decision has a person answerable for it, by name. The firm is built to be overseen by an independent board; those appointments are named publicly as they are confirmed.
Bring us the hard decision.
The easy decisions never needed us. Bring us the one that turns on a hard call — the kind you want owned by someone who stays for the outcome, not handed off with a deck.