Bildnachweis: Pexels.
GITEX Europe 2025 (21 – 23 May, Messe Berlin) marked the inaugural European edition of GITEX Global. Positioned as Europe’s most global tech and start-up event, it brought together over 2.500 exhibitors, more than 1.500 start-ups, and 800 investors! At the venue we have talked to various international exhibitors to gather insights from all over the world!
VC Magazin: The GITEX came to Berlin for the first time. You are here as an exhibitor – With which expectations did you come here?
Al Bastaki: First of all it is a pleasure to be here and a pleasure to meet you! One of the things that we constantly look at as Dubai is to be present everywhere. Dubai is an enabler, a connector and much more. That is what GITEX stands for: How do we connect people with the same mindsets, trying to achieve similar targets and do business where it makes sense? A lot of what we are trying to achieve is finding partners that help, so if I take a step back, we are primarily a fund of funds, we represent fund managers in our regions but also broadly and regional that see a synergy between the corridor effects that Dubai provides for their respective regions, and we are looking at Germany for exactly that. Are there players over here that are either investors, innovators, entrepreneurs, that see a lot of synergies with what Dubai has to offer: A place to do business, to penetrate the wider region over there & to leverage its connectivity!
Another aspect why we came to Berlin is finding partners that can find or help with synergies to soft land over here, it can be corporates, innovation centers or hubs! Beyond that we seek to help these entities soft land, through Berlin, to the wider region over here. We have heard good things about the talent pool over here! Furthermore it is about the internationalism: It makes a lot of sense for people if they are new to the region, new to the EU, that they go to an international hub! I think those synergies between what Dubai has to offer and what Berlin has to offer – there is a multitude of different factors that makes them very well equipped to be a bilateral partner!
VC Magazin: Are there any specific industries or use cases you are targeting? Could you name some highlights from your portfolio?
Al Bastaki: So what’s beautiful about being a fund of fund is we represent a number of fund managers, so right now that number is well over 200 indirect portfolio companies, so I am not coming here to say: „Here is one portfolio company I think is good, it is doing amazing, let’s talk business!“, but I’m coming with this sort of lay of the land of who’s out there that’s innovating, that’s venture-backed, that showed traction over there, that might want to expand beyond the region now.
We are looking at fund managers that have access in the market here, that are looking for amazing talented individuals that solve big problems on the market, but have done it a different way in our part of the world which might make a lot of sense over here, and vice versa, there might be solutions over here that we think we can connect to some of the fund managers in our part of the world. That is where they have the connectivity to access the connections, whether it’s corporate, whether it’s positioning on a consumer perspective or the penetration capabilities to help themselves run into the region over there.
VC Magazin: Which role does Germany play for your market specifically, and where do you see Dubai & Germany in five to ten years?
Al-Bastaki: So one of the things that I found over here is this willingness to innovate, there’s a lot of talent on the innovation part, great IP, and the question is then now once you’re going from IP to a commercialization, where would this IP suit be suited best? It does not always necessarily have to be in the local market, and that’s what I think is one of the things that is amazing is that there is great technical capacity over here, there are technical universities over here, that IP needs a home, needs a commercial market for it to be viable, for it to grow! It is important to give the people that work so hard to develop it, that sort of the runway to do more and continue to innovate to keep them motivated to work more, but at the same time that creates opportunities on our market to invest in that IP and bring it to the market where we feel like there’s a lot of potential attractions and problems that they are solving here.
The other way around is I find what Dubai has to offer just across the board in terms of the ability for these people to also potentially live, operate out of, where there’s connectivity to a lot: a large pool of capital, investors, people, connectivity, but a different set of them! I think that is an interesting proposition that I think Dubai plays a very good role in. We’ve done a lot of very good interesting deals. I think a couple of years ago when there was sort of a little bit of an energy crisis over here, the first country to step up and offer natural gas sort of solutions was the UAE. That willingness to be a trading partner, a bilateral partner, is very high on the agenda.
I have talked to our embassy over here and what is on the agenda. Germany is one of the most powerful and one of the highest-ranked bilateral partners that we have globally and the idea is now how do we diversify beyond the traditional business lines to do more on the
innovation space, the technical space, where there is an appetite from our side, there’s a lot of innovation from the German side, and how do we collaborate to do more business on that front?
VC Magazin: Thank you very much for your insights!
About the interview partner:
Nader Al Bastaki is the Managing Director of the Dubai Future District Fund. He oversees the fund, looks at how to create synergies with partners by constantly looking at finding like-minded people to share ideas in the business world.
