Focus Area
Space Technology
Most of the value in space is not in reaching orbit. It is in what the data is worth once it is on the ground, in the ground segment nobody photographs, and in the components that get ordered again on the next mission. The fund invests downstream of the launch, where the businesses are.
What we back.
- Earth observation and the analytics above it
- Optical, radar and radio-frequency sensing sold as a recurring answer to an operational question — movement, emissions, ground deformation, activity where there should be none — rather than as imagery priced by the scene.
- Communications and the ground segment
- Terminals and electronically steered antennas, modems, gateways, optical links and the scheduling software that decides whether a constellation is an asset or an operating cost.
- Subsystems and repeatable manufacture
- Propulsion, avionics, power, attitude control and radiation-tolerant electronics — components that get ordered across many buses and many operators, which is a far better business than building one bus.
- Resilient positioning and timing
- Backstops for a weak signal from orbit that far more infrastructure depends on than its operators realise: better clocks, alternative signals, and integrity monitoring that detects when the fix is being spoofed.
Why now
Why this sector, in this corridor, now.
Cheaper launch and mass-produced small satellites moved the bottleneck downstream. What is scarce now is ground infrastructure, spectrum and licensing position, downlink capacity, and the analytic layer that converts a pixel into something a customer will pay for on a subscription. Those are terrestrial businesses with space-derived inputs, and they can be assessed like any other technical company.
The Gulf is funding national space capability deliberately and with an explicit preference for building domestic engineering rather than buying finished systems. The geography helps as well: clear skies, open land and useful longitudes make the region genuinely valuable as ground-station, test and calibration territory. That is a physical advantage rather than a policy one, and it does not expire.
What we look for
What a company in this area has to show.
The five criteria in thethesisapply to every opportunity. These are the questions this area adds on top of them.
A customer who buys the answer, not the satellite
Recurring revenue from an operator who already changes a decision based on the output. A single demonstration contract proves the technology works and proves nothing about the business.
Spectrum, licensing and orbital position treated as assets
Filings, coordination status and regulatory standing take years to acquire, cannot be bought quickly, and belong in the diligence and the valuation rather than in an appendix.
A path off bespoke builds
A design qualified across missions, a production process that repeats, and honest unit economics that still name the parts which are hand-made — because those are the parts that cap the company's volume.
Latency to answer, measured end to end
The elapsed time from an event to a usable output on the customer's desk, including tasking, downlink, processing and delivery. In most competitive sales that single number decides the outcome.
Across the corridor
Why the corridor matters here.
US teams hold the component supply chain, the test facilities and the engineering depth; the region is funding ground infrastructure, local assembly and long-horizon capability with a clear expectation that skill transfers along with the hardware. That makes the Gulf an unusually good place to site the terrestrial half of a space business — stations, calibration, operations, analytics — while the spacecraft engineering stays where it already is. As in defence, what may lawfully move is a question answered before a structure is drawn, not after: export control governs the hardware, the technical data and the people who explain it, and the corridor only works for companies willing to engineer around that from the beginning.
What that support consists of in practice is set out underCapital + Capability, and how the two markets are covered underPlatform.
Next
Building in Space Technology?
Founders in the United States and the GCC can submit an opportunity for review, or read the five areas together.