$60m venture capital fund formed by Dubai firm

Muscat: Dubai-based TURN8 has launched a $60 million venture capital fund for technology innovation. TURN8 Innovation Fund is one of the largest providers of seed capital in the region catering to the global startup eco system.
“This strategic move comes from witnessing a major gap in the market for startups to grow from the accelerator stage into full-fledged businesses that attract venture capital. We are very excited to see more startups with different innovative technology rising from the Mena region and this fund will provide a further push to their business,” said Kamal Hassan, general partner of TURN8.
“The fund will continue to support the startup ecosystem and look for opportunities in technology innovation that match our portfolio requirements and are in line with our strategic objectives,” added Hassan.
TURN8 accelerator has successfully launched and invested in more than 60 companies till date. Some of the active and trending companies in their portfolio include Loadme — an online marketplace for freight exchange, serving the road transportation industry from Middle East and Kashmi — A Peer-to-Peer (P2P) payments service that facilitates the easy and safe transfer of cash between individuals through a simple social interface.
Other companies are Pixelbug — a technology company that enables brands to go beyond conventional media by using augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR) platform to engage with millennials and post-millennials; and Paack — a company that connects Omni-retailers' stores in major cities with Paack ́s convenient delivery fleet in order to create the fastest ecommerce delivery solution available in Europe.
DP World and Innovation360 setup the TURN8 accelerator in 2013. Since then it has successfully provided pre-seed funding to startups ranging from sectors such as digital healthcare, crowd sourcing, EduTech, FinTech and Enterprise Cloud Solutions and raised over $6million in co-investment for its portfolio companies from various worldwide investors. DP World is the first anchor investor, with over 20 per cent ownership of the fund.
The new fund will follow a dual investment strategy of seed funding to accelerator stage startups and follow-on funding for growth stage startups graduates of the TURN8 accelerator.