Wa'ed Ventures (Saudi Aramco Entrepreneurship Ventures)

Wa'ed Ventures is the $500 million venture capital fund wholly owned by Saudi Aramco, established in 2013 from Aramco's Dhahran headquarters to anchor the kingdom's start-up ecosystem under the Vision 2030 economic diversification agenda. The vehicle began as the Saudi Aramco Entrepreneurship Center (Wa'ed) in 2011 and was rebranded as Wa'ed Ventures in 2023 to reflect its pivot from a broad entrepreneurship-support organization into a focused institutional venture capital firm. CEO and Managing Director Fahad Alidi, a Yale-trained energy and environmental economist and former World Bank energy-reform advisor, leads the firm. Wa'ed Ventures writes tickets up to $20 million per investment and runs an explicit 'invest local plus localize global' playbook: it backs Saudi-domiciled tech founders, and it invests in best-in-class international companies on the condition they establish meaningful operations and talent inside Saudi Arabia, and it is willing to lead. The investment mandate spans five core domains, digital and software, sustainability and climate, social innovation, industrial, and advanced manufacturing, with a stated $100M earmark for early-stage AI announced in October 2024. Across approximately 75 to 151 disclosed investments depending on the database, Wa'ed has deployed approximately $270M of capital. Marquee 2024 to 2025 transactions include UK AI cloud-infrastructure company Ori, which is launching a Riyadh subsidiary and deploying Nvidia H200 chips, French quantum computing company Pasqal, which will install the first quantum computer in Saudi Arabia, South Korean AI semiconductor company Rebellions, a $15M Series B Extension in July 2024, and edge-computing infrastructure company Edgenomics. Wa'ed Ventures anchors Saudi Arabia's startup ecosystem.