Friday 19 / April / 2024
Muscat: A British firm is helping Omani business owners develop their start-ups, with the intention of using them to provide innovative solutions to challenges businesses in the region may face in the future.
Hambro Perks, a London-based company that builds and develops start-ups and SMEs from the ground up, recently signed an agreement with the Oman Tech Fund (OTF) to create the British-Omani Technology Gateway, a pathway that helps Omani SMEs profit from the skills that Hambro can provide them to help develop their businesses in a sustainable, reactive manner.
Two of the areas that could benefit from the presence of start-ups that could potentially provide alternative solutions to challenges faced, are education and finance, according to Ali Qaiser, an Omani national and the managing director at Hambro Perks.
“You are seeing some great examples coming out of Oman, but I just think it’s really early,” he said, speaking to Times of Oman. “I don’t see any hurdles right now, I just think we need to keep supporting the ecosystem. The government and OTF are doing many initiatives, and there are many private plans as well. In Oman, I think there is potential in financial technology, because the banks may need help in fintech. There is also a lot of scope in education technology.
He added: “I would ask entrepreneurs to go through an incubation or acceleration programme, because you will get the right advice and the right support, especially in an early ecosystem. I also ask people to find the right co-founders, because this will make life easy for you instead of going it alone. Building the right team that shares a common ethos is very important, because in the early days, it is all about the passion, all about the talent. You can have a great team and not such a good idea, but they might be able to raise a lot of funding. If you have an amazing product but a team that is not good, you might not get anywhere.”
Qaiser was in Oman shortly after the conclusion of OTF’s Accelerator programme, which saw 10 start-ups from the Sultanate and the surrounding region also come to the Hambro Perks office in London for two weeks for training, guidance and counselling.
“That was signed in August 2018, and the next step was looking at how we could put this into place,” he recalled. “OTF ran the Wadi Accelerator programme to take 10 high-growth start-ups from the region to come and be based in Muscat and be part of the accelerator. They invest in the start-ups, that use Oman as their base, and what we did is offer to host a part of this in London, so 10 companies from Oman and the surrounding area were based in London at Hambro Perks for two weeks.
He added: “This was an unbelievable experience for two weeks. They were given training and counselling and mentoring in things like tech, growth, SEO, investments, fund-raising, scaling their companies internationally, so helping them get experience that would be very different to what they would be getting in Oman, as well as becoming part of a mature ecosystem in the UK. London and Berlin are currently the two tech hubs in Europe.”
Qaiser also said that they were discussing with the OTF how to bring start-ups that wished to expand into the Middle East and wider region to Oman, and then use the Sultanate as their base of operations in the area.
“We’ve managed to create partnership opportunities between companies in the UK and Oman, some of these companies want to come to Oman, so there is a lot of trade flow that’s happening,” he said. “We are currently working on some deals. The next step has to be how we can invest in the technology here, find the best deals coming out of Oman and in the region, and leveraging deals with OTF to do that, and in the same way, how can we help OTF to come to the UK and invest in the best deals there.
He added: “In the UK, for every problem that requires to be solved, there are about 10 or 15 products that come, so it is a very saturated market. Here, there is one guy trying to solve a problem and that presents them a big opportunity. What’s more is that they could use Oman as a test market for the wider region.”
Oman is a small country in terms of population because there are only about five million people, so they could be based in Muscat and then expand in Dubai, Riyadh and India, so there are many advantages to being based in a young and neutral ecosystem.”
