Wa’ed Ventures Invests in Roots Ventures

• Wa’ed Ventures, the VC arm of Aramco, has invested in Revival Lab to launch its venture builder Roots Ventures.
• The investment aims to adopt venture-building practices and activities to build skilled project teams with domain expertise and the ability to create and launch a product fast in the kingdom.
• Founded by Mohammed Almaghlouth, Revival Lab is a sector-agnostic venture builder that enables entrepreneurs to scale up the next unicorns.

Roots Ventures, the Saudi-based emerging venture builder, announces its partnership with Wa’ed Ventures, the Kingdom-focused venture capital arm of Aramco.

This investment marks Wa’ed Ventures’ first investment in a venture builder, with expanding trends in Saudi Arabia and the region to adopt venture-building practices and activities resulting in creating highly skilled project teams with deep domain expertise and the ability to create and launch a product fast.

Through this investment and partnership, Roots Ventures is planning to promote venture capital and early-stage investing role in supporting sustainability objectives by building and empowering emergency-fit, impact-driven ecosystems of innovators, enablers, and entrepreneurs to develop and execute disruptive and scalable business models.

Fahad Alidi, Managing Director and CEO of Wa’ed Ventures said “Saudi VCs realise today the critical and crucial role to play in achieving such ambitious objectives, where sustainability-driven entrepreneurship and early-stage investing activities are key to building a better tomorrow for the Kingdom and the globe.” He continued “ our strategic investment in Roots Ventures is driven by our mandate to build national champions across emerging sectors in Saudi Arabia while enhancing the Kingdomʼs venture investment ecosystem with impact at the core.”

Mohammed Almaghlouth, Partner and CEO of Revival lab said “Venture builders do not just co-build startups. They also help less-experienced entrepreneurs to growth-hack and scale their businesses into new markets. This has never been more relevant to any sector in Saudi Arabia than sustainability with the country's great ambitions toward playing a leading role in sustainability on a global level. Hence comes the strategic mandate of Roots Ventures”.

“We are confident in achieving an ambitious vision and mandate with the support of our founding partners (Wa'ed Ventures and Revival Lab), and our local and global strategic partners and enablers. It's a collective endeavour and we all believe in the power of collaboration to make this a reality.” Said Ahamd Alsaidlani, Founder and CEO of Roots Ventures. “Each new venture in Roots Ventures portfolio will be developed through a shark-tank approach, where only the most impactful and scalable ventures are built within our collaborative ecosystem.”

An estimated $3–10 trillion in EBITDA will be up for grabs for startups offering commercial solutions to decarbonize society, dwarfing the size of the entire software industry by an order of magnitude according to a report published by Morgan Stanly, and during 2022, around $80 billion of VC investments (more than 25% of the total investment made) were directed to sustainability and climate-tech startups. While the transformation of the global economy needed to achieve net zero by 2050 would be universal and significant, requiring investments of at least $4 trillion to $6 trillion a year as highlighted during COP27.Innovation, Venture investment and entrepreneurship will play a critical role to achieve this. Globally, the number of emerging startups and technology companies tackling the climate crisis has increased 4x, by over 35,000 firms since 2010 to reach 44,595 in 2022. It is expected that total Sustainability focused startups will reach 66,000 by 2023.

“It is expected that due to the high commitments of Saudi Arabia that we are going to witness greater growth in sustainability entrepreneurship and investing in the country to help in delivering such ambitious objectives.” Said Alsaidlani

(Press Release)