We co-founded KaRama Venture Studio, a Riyadh-based company builder that originates, incorporates, and capitalizes health technology companies from inside the Saudi Food and Drug Authority campus in Hittin. The studio was created to address a specific bottleneck in the Kingdom's health sector transformation. Capital had begun arriving well ahead of investable companies, and the binding constraint on localization was not funding but company formation itself. KaRama was built to remove that constraint by forming the companies rather than waiting for them to appear.

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Our involvement began at inception and remains a principal one. We hold an equity stake in the studio and serve on its leadership as Chief Investment Officer, with responsibility for investment strategy, portfolio construction, and capital formation. The mandate was to build an institution that could form Saudi health technology companies at a repeatable cadence, carry each one through SFDA clearance and Ministry of Health procurement readiness, and open it to outside capital only once a first Kingdom contract had been signed. The result is a company builder that behaves like an operator and invests like a principal.

 

Client: KaRama Venture Studio (KaRamaVS)

Location: Hittin, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Role: Co-Founder | Equity Partner | Investment Strategy | Capital Formation

 

Our Approach and Work

• Studio formation and founding structure – Co-founded the entity alongside its Saudi clinical and operating partners, setting the founder's stake taken at incorporation, the cap table conventions applied across every portfolio company, and the governance that separates studio economics from founder economics.

• Investment strategy and portfolio construction – Built the studio's investment thesis and allocation framework across three areas of focus, biotech, medtech, and AI and automation, selected because Saudi health systems had already identified what they could not buy. Capital is committed from the studio's own balance sheet at incorporation rather than drawn against a conventional fund.

• Financial architecture and capital formation – Developed the studio's operating and portfolio model covering company-level burn, staged capital requirements, follow-on reserves, and the syndication logic that determines when a company is opened to outside investors and on what terms.

• Regulatory-first localization – Embedded the regulatory pathway into company design rather than treating it as a downstream step, covering SFDA clearance, data residency, Saudization, and Ministry of Health procurement readiness. This is the stage at which imported startups most often fail, and it is the stage the studio was purpose-built for.

• Institutional and government alignment – Positioned the studio as a working contributor to the Health Sector Transformation Program, with relationships across the SFDA, Monshaat, and the Ministry of Health, supported by platform and go-to-market partnerships with Microsoft, Google, and AWS.

• A repeatable operating method – Codified a four-stage build sequence, originate, incorporate, localize, and scale, so that each company follows a documented path rather than a bespoke one. The method makes the studio's output measurable, its capital requirements predictable, and its model transferable to adjacent Gulf markets.

 

Objectives

Objective I – Establish a resident company builder inside the Saudi regulatory and clinical environment, capable of forming health technology companies against verified unmet needs rather than imported product theses.

Objective II – Create an investment platform in which the studio holds founder economics in every company it forms, aligning long-term value creation with the Kingdom's localization objectives under Vision 2030.

Objective III – Build a formation model that produces companies at a predictable cadence and can be extended across the wider Gulf without rebuilding the underlying institution.

 

Outcome and Business Impact

• Studio established and operating: KaRama Venture Studio is incorporated and resident on the SFDA campus in Hittin, Riyadh, placing the science, the regulator, and the buyer within the same operating radius and giving the studio standing that cannot be replicated from outside the Kingdom.

• Portfolio built at scale: Fifteen companies have been built or co-founded to date across biotech, medtech, and AI and automation, with the pipeline distributed across all four studio stages as of July 2026, including six companies in regulatory and procurement localization and four already contracted and expanding.

• Regulatory and commercial traction secured: Portfolio companies are progressing through SFDA pathways and Ministry of Health procurement readiness, with the first cohort of contracted companies now expanding from a single cluster toward wider Kingdom and Gulf deployment.

• External validation achieved: Portfolio companies have won or placed at national and international competitions, including the Health Datathon and the Healthon Hackathon, recognition at GOSH 7, finalist standing at WHX Dubai, and representation at Web Summit Qatar and the Saudi pavilion in San Diego.

• Capital platform in place: The balance sheet model, founder's stake convention, and staged syndication framework now govern how outside capital enters each company, giving investors a defined entry point at a defined stage rather than an open-ended one.

• Model made replicable: The formation method, governance architecture, and regulatory sequence are documented to a standard that allows the model to be extended to adjacent Gulf markets without rebuilding the institution behind it.

 

Expanded closing

The formation of KaRama reflects a view we have held for some time about how emerging health and industrial economies actually develop. The scarce input in Saudi Arabia is not capital and it is not technology, both of which are available in quantity and both of which arrive on their own. What is scarce is the company itself, meaning the legal entity that has cleared the regulator, is staffed locally, holds its data in the Kingdom, and can be bought from by a Saudi health cluster on a normal procurement cycle. Localization targets are met by companies existing. A venture studio is the instrument that produces them.

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Our position in KaRama is a principal position and it is intended to stay that way. We took equity at formation, we sit on the investment side of the business, and our return depends on the same outcome the Kingdom's transformation program depends on, which is companies that exist, that clear, and that can be procured from. That alignment is the point of the structure. It is also, in our experience, the only version of this work that holds up across a full cycle.