Shorooq Partners, early-stage venture capital firm, launched the second edition of its seed stage-focused fund, Bedaya Fund II, targeting a fund size of $150 million. Bedaya Fund II is a continuation of the same strategy Shorooq Partners has been executing since its inception, as the firm is doubling down on the earliest stages of the startup founders’ journey.

Bedaya Fund II will primarily focus on the pre-seed, seed, pre-series A, and series A stage startups in FinTech, software, platform verticals, and digital assets.

“We have always been early movers, be that robo-advisory, crowdfunding, SME lending, open banking, card issuer processing, and so forth. We believe Web 3.0 models like DeFi, NFT, Metaverse are going to be the key players in the next iteration of online business. Shorooq Partners has been preparing for this new wave of technology disruption, and we are well-positioned to back the upcoming category leaders of Web 3.0 in our region ,” said Shane Shin, a founding partner at Shorooq Partners. 

Shorooq Partners recently led the pre-seed round of Nuqtah, the first NFT born out of Saudi Arabia, and will continue to concentrate on the Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan region, where most of its companies have headquartered their respective operations. 

The firm has made over 80 investments in over 50 companies that currently have a gross equity value of $1.5 billion. These companies have created more than 5,000 jobs, and include names such as Pure Harvest Smart Farms, TruKKer, Capiter, Lean Technologies, Sarwa, Lendo, NymCard, Breadfast, Airlift, Mozn, Aumet, and more.