Gaurav Dhar, CEO and Founder of The WorxShop and Board Member at MFTA, sold 70 percent of his fintech business to a sovereign wealth fund, kept a 30 percent stake and a permanent board seat, and now sits on the other side of the deals he once needed.
In this episode of Wall Street to Mena, Raghda Ibraheem asks Dhar what that transition actually teaches a founder: how sophisticated investors evaluate maturity, why sovereign wealth funds and private equity are not looking to operate your business, and what governance needs to look like before institutional capital walks in the door.
Dhar also outlines where MENA’s opportunity with sovereign capital is being missed, and why the region’s growing bench of seasoned operators is the real unlock for surfacing early-stage businesses before they become obvious.
On MFTA’s policy agenda, Dhar names stablecoins as the priority for the year, an area the UAE Central Bank has begun to formalise through its Payment Token Services Regulation, which has licensed dirham and foreign-currency payment token issuers as part of a global stablecoin market now estimated at 300 billion dollars. MFTA’s role, across its 22-market network, is convening regulators, financial institutions, startups, and capital around what comes next.