MENA’s Biggest Funding Rounds Are Going To The Same Few Names – What About Everyone Else?

MENA’s venture capital numbers look impressive on paper. Total VC funding across the region reached $3.8 billion in 2025, up roughly 74% year-on-year according to MAGNiTT’s FY 2025 MENA VC Report. The region outpaced many of its emerging-market peers.

Take a closer look and you’ll realise it’s a different picture – a few major deals are doing most of the work.In January 2026 alone, two transactions accounted for over $400 million of the month’s $563 million total – led by Mal’s $230 million seed round and Property Finder’s $170 million round. A large share of 2025’s capital went to late-stage and debt-style financings rather than broad-based early-stage investment. Early-stage deals still make up the majority of deal count across the region, but they represent a small fraction of total capital raised.

That mismatch between investment capital and completed deals is a critical factor. When the headline number is driven by a small number of nine-figure rounds, it creates a distorted picture of how accessible the market really is for the founders who aren’t raising at that scale.

What Concentration Actually Does To The Market

Funding concentration alters behavior, not just optics. When media coverage and LP conversations revolve around nine-figure rounds, smaller funds and angel investors start chasing companies that look like near-unicorns and undervaluing the ones that don’t. Niche, capital-efficient founders – the kind building solid B2B products or deep-tech platforms with strong unit economics – get overlooked not because their businesses are weaker, but because they don’t fit the narrative.

The structural disadvantage compounds – a startup that raises $230 million can hire globally, pay competitive salaries, buy market share and fund aggressive marketing. A seed-stage company raising $1 million in the same market can’t match any of that. The difference between the two isn’t just about money – it highlights what large funding rounds make possible, advantages that make it harder for everyone else to compete for talent, customers and visibility.

Deep-tech, healthtech and B2B-focused founders in smaller MENA markets – Morocco, Jordan, parts of North Africa feel this most acutely. According to Wamda, MENA startup funding slipped to $941 million in Q1 2026 amid heightened geopolitical risk, with the slowdown concentrated in early-stage deals. These founders often have healthier margins and stronger unit economics than the headline consumer-internet names, but they’re competing for a thinner slice of a skewed market.

Where The Capital Actually Is

The on-the-ground reality for early-stage founders in MENA is that the most relevant capital often isn’t coming from the global funds chasing mega-rounds. Local sovereign-linked funds and regional-focused VCs – those with mandates to back MENA-specific companies at earlier stages – are more likely to write a seed cheque than a global fund managing a billion-dollar vehicle. Targeting them first, rather than trying to match the positioning of a Mal or Property Finder, is a more realistic starting point.

Non-dilutive funding is underused – the surge in late-stage and debt-style financing that has inflated MENA’s headline numbers is also a telling indicator: the region has appetite for receivables-based lending, revenue-based financing and government-linked grants. For companies that don’t want to build on a unicorn-track narrative, these instruments deserve serious consideration.

There’s also a product positioning argument. The sectors that dominate MENA’s large rounds – fintech, AI-native SaaS, proptech – attract capital because they map directly to the region’s most pressing commercial needs. A founder who can find a tightly scoped wedge within one of those sectors – embedded finance for a specific vertical, say, or AI tooling for a niche enterprise workflow – can stay close to the themes that attract capital without needing the same scale as the headline names.

What Needs To Change

The funding concentration problem in MENA has a structural dimension that individual founders can’t solve on their own. The region needs more dedicated pre-seed and seed funds, and more structured bridge programmes that stop early-stage companies from being forced into a “raise big or fail” dynamic. The current setup rewards founders who can access the right rooms – and disadvantages the majority who can’t.

Storytelling through media and LPs is crucial here too. When the coverage focuses almost entirely on deal size, it steers capital toward the biggest names and makes the rest of the market invisible. Tracking early-stage success metrics – founder diversity, cross-border expansion, export revenue, unit economics – rather than just round size would give a more accurate picture of where the region’s most resilient businesses are actually being built.

MENA’s big funding rounds are now attracting global attention – that’s a good thing. But a healthy startup economy isn’t just measured by its largest cheques – it’s measured by how many founders outside the top tier have a realistic path to capital, customers and scale. The path forward is tighter than the numbers lead one to believe.