Your fundraising timeline in GCC

If you are planning to raise seed/series A in MENA (Middle East North Africa) now, here is your approximate timeline.

January 18: Download investor databases from Crunchbase and PitchBook. Assign an assistant to enrich it with data from Lusha and a marketer to write outreach chains in emails and LinkedIn. Your employee need to start working 24/7 now.

January 19: After the edits, you receive a well-crafted text and ready-made databases. Connect Phantombuster and Lemlist (or their variations) and launch the first tests.

January 22: Discuss the initial results with your team, including the first responses from investors (yes/no), additional questions, and perhaps a couple of scheduled calls if you were smart to include Calendly link to your email outreach.

January 24: If there is positive feedback, good conversions, open rates, click rates, and connection rates, take the next step: scale the effect.

From January 22 to February 2, you need to:

• Drive thousands of emails and messages on LinkedIn.
• Reach out to all your founder friends, asking them to recommend you to their investors.
• Explore other conferences on your topic in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Kuwait, and Qatar starting from Web Summit, LEAP etc.
• Contact investors from the previous round, urging them to bring their friends to the current round.
• Ask fund managers you know to download their databases of funds relevant to you.
• Promote your startup on all social networks, highlighting its cool features.
• Organize a live event on LinkedIn where you and your potential investors discuss your core industry and innovative market solutions (including yours). LinkedIn has a great internal instrument to promote these kinds of events.
• Secure PR articles showcasing how top your startup is.
• Instruct your assistant/PR manager to book you as a speaker at all conferences- this is not a waste of time, this is your main source of contacts.
• Cold call investors by finding their phone numbers on Lusha. Yes, this really works in our region!
• Request introductions from mutual acquaintances with the required investor. Investors love to be introduced to great founders by companies they already invested in. This is the best pipeline source for them.
• ... something else.

On February 2, sit down and realize that this effort has resulted in a potential 20-60 calls, and your calendar is full of meetings and calls until the end of February. Now you're safe.

Assume that it takes 3 days to a maximum 4 weeks to place your first call with VC.

February 6: Have your first call with your first investor, where, hurray, you realize it's a match (though 90% of the time, it may not be a match, but they might know someone and can connect you).

February 14: The investment committee is held either immediately after the call or the following week. Find out the result, and let’s say it's positive, and you move on to due diligence. The investor doesn’t have any additional questions (which is rare).

February 26 - March 8 is the fastest you can count on receiving a due diligence response because:

March 4-7: Everyone will be at LEAP in Riyadh.

March 9: Ramadan begins. You can relax. If you have not received confirmation from funds like Global.vc, in which the team consists of 50/50 Europeans and Arabs, many local funds may not work.

April 8: The Middle East returns from the hungry day coma and night celebrations and begins to work. With all due respect to people in the Middle East, I was fasting last year and I remember how hard is it to process information when you haven't eaten anything for 10 hours. You tend to prioritize what is important (most investors this time work just with the current portfolio).

April 11-15: Please don't disturb us; it's Eid! (Holiday after Ramadan)

April 15 - May 3: The last chance to get a positive decision and find a person in the fund who will complete the deal before the children's holidays, as everyone is leaving for the summer.

The next possibility is: “Come in mid-September.” If you have a runway until the end of March 2025, start raising at the end of August, following the steps outlined above. Allow 6 months for attracting from the first calls to the money in the account (during the season! And even though you are the top 🔥)

In any other case, invite me to work together, and I will share my contacts to strengthen your pipeline with a bunch of great, active venture capital funds that are relevant to your stage/check/industry/technology/geography.