Riyadh Joins the Global Rising Stars — and Sets the Pace

Dealroom's "Rising Stars" lens isn't a scale ranking. It measures growth in enterprise value and new unicorns, then adjusts for local GDP per capita and cost of living.

That adjustment matters.

It strips out the advantage smaller, cheaper economies get when growth is calculated off a low base, and it filters out mature hubs whose growth has plateaued. The Bay Area, London, and Singapore don't appear here for that reason. The top five is a snapshot of where the next wave of global tech is actually being built.

Riyadh is the headline. A 27.2x jump in enterprise value and a 6.0x increase in new unicorns put it in a league of its own, more than double the EV growth of Istanbul (11.3x) and Johannesburg (11.1x), and triple the unicorn velocity of every other city on the list. What makes the number more striking is that Riyadh delivers it from a $36.2K GDP-per-capita base, the highest in the cohort. This isn't growth flattered by a low denominator. It's growth happening despite the GDP adjustment working against it. The drivers are familiar: Public Investment Fund deployment into gaming, fintech, and foodtech; the Vision 2030 push to localize technology talent; and a regulatory environment that has pulled fintech and gaming licenses from across the region.

Istanbul (11.3x EV growth, 7 unicorns) is the closest analogue in spirit. Turkey's ecosystem has been quietly producing globally relevant companies for years. Peak Games, Dream Games, Getir, Trendyol, Insider. Gaming and quick-commerce continue to drive new unicorn formation. At a $13.4K GDP per capita and a 43.8 cost-of-living index, Istanbul fits the classic "rising star" profile: meaningful output from a mid-income economy.

Mumbai (7.1x EV growth, 24 unicorns) brings density rather than velocity. India already has the unicorn count; what's growing is the depth of the bench beneath them, particularly in fintech and consumer commerce. Hefei (6.8x) is China's quieter answer to Shenzhen, a semiconductor and EV cluster that rarely makes Western headlines but compounds steadily. Johannesburg (11.1x, 2 unicorns) anchors the African pipeline, with fintech and digital payments leading the way.

The composition of this list says something. Four of the five hubs sit in emerging markets, and the one outlier, Riyadh, is an emerging market by capital deployment rather than by income level. For MENA founders and investors, the read-through is direct: the region now has a hub that doesn't just feature in global rising-stars conversations, it leads them. The next test is whether that growth converts into durable enterprise value once the headline multiples normalize.