UAE’s Sharjah Entrepreneurship Centre looking for quality over quantity

Established five years ago, the centre has so far supported 114 start-ups that have gone on to raise over $70 million in investment and have generated cumulatively over $80 million in revenue and created over 1,300 jobs in the UAE.

Midfa told Arabian Business: “Our goal over the coming years is to increase that number, but one thing that we know for sure is that Sharjah is definitely seen or Sheraa especially as an organisation, is seen as a great place to take that first step on your entrepreneurial journey.

“We are not focused on quantity. Our goal is not to say that we have tens of thousands of start-ups in Sharjah, but the start-ups that we do have, we really try to give them a personalised and customised approach to helping them set-up and grow their business.”

Midfa revealed that, over the past five years, Sheraa has been able to provide over $1 million-worth of contracts to its start-ups. “It’s a number that we’re proud of and a number we’re looking to increase,” she said.

Last year, Sharjah was ranked number one in the very early stage ecosystem, in the GSER (Global Start-up Ecosystem Report) report published by Silicon Valley-based Startup Genome, finishing ahead of the Kazakhstan capital Nur-Sultan, Ireland and Bahrain.

“What we’re hoping now over the years is that we move out of the early stage bucket and into the other stages of the life cycle and continue to hold number one spot,” said Midfa.

One way they are hoping to achieve that is through the recent launch of the Sharjah Start-up Studio (S3), the first government-backed start-up studio in the UAE, which will take a more hands-on approach to venture building with a dedicated team of experienced experts to work alongside founders.

“When you look at the start-up studio, the model we’re using is almost as though we’re a co-founder with those start-ups. We’re still not taking equity, we’ve never taken equity in any of the start-ups that we’ve supported. Not because we think it’s unfriendly to the founders, but at the end of the day we wanted to give them that option to retain a full ownership of their businesses,” said Midfa.

Najla Al Midfa, CEO of Sheraa.

This revenue-sharing model, with founders retaining full ownership of their businesses, provides founders with $30,000 in pre-seed funding and allows them to focus on building a high-quality product, achieving sustainable growth and profitability, while also creating impact.

Midfa would like to see the studio address a current gap in support for start-ups at the pre-seed stage.

She said: “We’ll test this in the studio, because by the time they come out of the studio, they’ll have their product, they’ll have some early traction, but they’ll still be considered pre-seed.

“Investors often say they’re open to it, but when it actually comes to writing the cheques, we haven’t seen many of them willing to write the cheques at that stage.

“That’s something we’ll be keeping an eye on and what we’re hoping is that we’ll see more investors start to come in earlier on.

“When we first started SHERAA five years ago everyone used to say, series A was the sweetspot and then over the years they started getting more into seed and my guess is that more and more they’re going to move earlier and earlier so I do think you’re going to start to see a little more pre-seed investment this year.”

And Midfa has hopes that this will lead to further start-ups launching and calling Sharjah home. She said: “My goal is that every start-up that comes out of the Sharjah start-up studio, and we’re looking at around 10 a year, I’d like each and every one of those start-ups to feel incentivised to be based in Sharjah. I don’t want them to oblige them. Ideally what I’d like to see if for them to say, yes we could be based anywhere, but it makes sense to be in Sharjah because this team is as invested in our success as we are.”