National Net Ventures, better known as N2V, and one of the top internet groups in the Middle East, have been on an investment roll lately, announcing three new investments in regional startups within the past couple of weeks alone.
The three startups cover three different areas, following N2V’s strategy to diversify their portfolio of internet properties and expand regionally and globally to cover new areas of interest for users in the Arab world.
The announced investments were in the following startups: AqarMap, Qaym and True-Gaming.
AqarMap: An Arab map-based real estate portal, that was founded by Amad Almsaodi from Yemen in 2010, and previously reviewed here.
N2V’s investment in AqarMap was a joint one, with other Arab investors getting in on this round of investment, namely Jamal Al-Muttareb (CEO of Al Muttareb Group) and Fadi Ghandour (CEO of MENA Venture Investments & Aramex).
The startup hopes to use the cash infusion to upgrade the level of services AqarMap offers to its growing number of users, and add a number of services they’ve been looking at getting into.
Qaym: An Arab portal for user generated restaurant and coffee shop reviews, that was founded by Jihad Al-Ammar from Saudi Arabia in 2007 and officially launched in April 2008, and that was previously reviewed here.
Qaym had previously received early stage investments from two angel investors: Abdulrahman Tarabzouni and Nichola Eliovits; and N2V’s fresh investment in the startup should give it a push to continue growing regionally and to roll out new features and enhancements to the service.
True-Gaming: An Arab video games portal, providing news, reviews, discussion boards and more around video games from around the world, for an Arab audience. The site was founded by Mohammed Albsimi from Saudi Arabia in 2004.
N2V’s investment is the first one for the site, and confirms N2V’s interest to expand in the online and mobile gaming industry, after them working closely with online game sites through their portfolio companies One Card and NetAd-Vantage.
The founder hopes that this investment will help provide the necessary resources and tools to accelerate the site’s growth and provide even more value to the community.
As has become customary in the region, no details were provided on the sizes of the investments in any of the companies or the valuations at which the investments happened.
Don’t you have the amount by which these companies were funded?
Unfortunately no, for some reason companies and investors choose to never announce the size of the investment in our region.
I am really curious to know what are the exact reasons.
I’m going to try and dig a bit deeper into the mindset behind this and why investors and entrepreneurs always choose to keep investment amounts secret in our region, and will maybe put a post together about this if I get enough input.
they have no reason to reveal the numbers without a clear benefit or regulatory reason to do so. if they paid a rich amount then the buyer wouldn’t want it impacting values in the rest of the market and if it was too low the seller probably wouldn’t want it known that he made a paltry amount if any.
investors in the US are generally required to be forthcoming for a variety of reasons including commercial and regulatory although there are many private transactions there as well.