Across the Gulf, women looking to start businesses have more institutional support than ever. The UAE Ministry of Economy and Tourism has expanded programmes and resources for female entrepreneurs, coinciding with more women entering the business space. As of March 2026, 48,257 Emirati women are reported to be entrepreneurs, and women own or co-own more than 114,000 small and medium-sized enterprises across the UAE. Separately, the Abu Dhabi Registration Authority announced that it issued 3,058 new economic licences to female entrepreneurs in the first half of 2026, up 6.4 per cent from 2,873 licenses issued during the same period in 2025.
The same race toward growth in the female-led entrepreneurial space is echoed across the Levant. A recent World Bank report found that Jordan has made significant progress in women’s entrepreneurship, surpassing targets with its $226 million Strengthening Economic Opportunities for Women Project. Women-owned businesses in Jordan reached 2,026 as of July 2026, more than double the target of 1,000 scheduled for June 2028. In Lebanon, UN-backed programmes are providing women-led businesses with funding and technical support.
However, despite the surge in institutional and government-backed support for female entrepreneurs, capital flowing to women-led companies has remained low.
In the first half of 2026, male-founded startups in the MENA region captured nearly 95 per cent of all capital, raising $1.7 billion across 213 deals. In comparison, female-founded companies secured only $2.5 million across 14 transactions, taking in just 0.14 per cent of total funding. Mixed-gender founder teams accounted for the remainder of deals.
Divya Unnikrishnan, co-founder of NoorConnect, a technology and AI services provider, has experienced that disconnect firsthand. The Dubai-based entrepreneur and her female co-founder are building AI products at a moment when artificial intelligence is attracting some of the region’s biggest investment rounds. “Getting meetings with investors, we have sort of figured it out,” Unnikrishnan said. Two or three meetings in, they are still not convinced, she explained when she had to raise capital. “The final cheque… it’s been a challenge.”
Unnikrishnan spent nearly two decades in the corporate world, working at companies like Accenture, Capgemini, and HP, before jumping into entrepreneurship a little more than a year ago.
Breaking into the UAE’s startup ecosystem required a different playbook, she explained. Unnikrishnan found that cold outreach to investors only went so far. Access often only came through warm introductions, accelerators, mentors, and founder communities. Even after her company placed in the top 10 of an accelerator programme, Unnikrishnan said she still encountered partiality from investors.
“I would say the opportunity is there. But a little bit of bias is always there,” she said.
Heather Henyon, a founding partner of Mindshift Capital, which invests in women-led companies across the US, Middle East and Europe, says the problem isn’t lack of founders looking for capital. Mindshift reviews roughly 1,000 companies each year. “We are inundated by women-led companies seeking capital. There certainly isn’t a shortage,” said Henyon.
Mindshift invests at the seed, bridge, and Series A stages, but Henyon says the biggest funding gap for female founders is at Series A. “Generally, female founders raise less capital than all-male founding teams, and the UAE has a similar dynamic,” Henyon said.
Part of the problem, Henyon argues, is who controls the capital and influences where it goes. For example, she points out that women account for roughly 10 per cent of general partners at venture firms in the US, and that’s an even smaller share in the MENA region. “Change one side to change the other,” Henyon said.
Carlina Marani sees that pipeline firsthand. After more than two decades in leadership roles at companies like Accenture, IBM, Microsoft, Cisco and Dell, she now advises startups and co-leads TiE Women MENA, where she works closely with women founders seeking to grow their businesses. The accelerator works with women founders across the region by providing mentorship opportunities, expanding investor access, creating networking pathways, and hosting a final startup pitch competition where the winner earns a $50,000 equity cash prize. In the MENA region, the programme works with female founders across five tracks, including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and parts of the Levant to help founders develop their pitches and put finalists in front of investors.
However, Marani cautions against thinking that the funding gap women face is a problem unique to the Middle East. The World Economic Forum reported that in 2025, only 2 per cent of total venture capital globally went to all-female founder teams. “If we look at global development, especially with the US kind of reversing all the inclusion and diversity programmes, etc, I think that has set us back a lot, right?” she said. Women from all over face these disparities, which leads her to a bleak view about how quickly that will change.
More than 200 women applied to the TiE Women MENA’s programmes this year, roughly double the number when it began, Marani said, noting that applicant quality has also improved. “One of my friends is raising money in Europe, and she got me a T-shirt, and it says, ‘Need money, not friends’,” Marani said. “I think that’s a good tagline for what we need to give the females. I’m not saying more, but as much money as we’re giving the males.”
Marani said she sees women building businesses that could attract venture capital, including companies in AI and health tech. But even when they make it through the funding pipeline, she sees another disparity emerge: how much they ask for and what they ultimately receive.
“The biggest problem is the cheque size,” she said.
That gap isn’t necessarily because women arrive before investors unprepared, she said. By the time many founders reach TiE Women, they have already moved through accelerators and other startup programmes, and the strongest candidates come prepared with financial projections, revenue figures, and a clear fundraising ask.
Women tend to seek the amount of capital they believe they need, while male founders may be more willing to ask for significantly more. Women tend to be practical, Marani explained. “Whereas the male pitches ask for three times what they need.”
But Marani also sees a deeper problem in the kinds of companies investors are willing to back. Many women coming through the TiE Women programme are building companies related to sustainability, health, community, and often social impact, she explained. Meanwhile, some of the region’s biggest investors are increasingly focused on the A sector and others in the tech space that are commanding higher valuations.
For example, she points to a founder she met whose business model turned plastic bottles into panels, or another founder who made chemical-free tissues from bamboo. “The problem is the money goes to all the hype. AI, tech, right? Quick money,” Marani said. “And I do understand the VC, right? The VC is there to make money. And the VC is there to say, I want a return on investment. So what do they bet on? They bet on the things that are hyping up,” not the sustainable companies that give back to communities that are harder to scale and build a clear ROI.
The kind of companies women entrepreneurs tend to need funding for, coupled with the fact that most VC firms are male-dominated, is a recipe for a systemic backstop, Marani explained. “So how do you get into the old boys’ network?” she asked. “On the back end, we will need more females in VC and angel investor spaces,” adding that women in these spaces need to focus more on the socially conscious companies.
But for founders like Unnikrishnan building in AI, the promise isn’t fully there, as she has still struggled to raise funds with her co-founder. She explained that while there’s a lot of excitement around AI, conversations with investors around scalability are usually a backstop.
Saima Tariq Khan has taken a different approach. She is a computer systems engineer with more than two decades of experience in technology and education space, and she founded OrionsFlow in 2024, a Dubai-based company focused on AI governance and education.
“The rapid adoption of AI made one thing increasingly clear to me: organisations were moving much faster in adopting the technology than they were in developing the governance needed to use it responsibly,” Khan said. “OrionsFlow emerged from that gap. I wanted to take AI governance out of the realm of high-level principles and make it practical — through tools, assessments, training and advisory work that organisations, including smaller companies and startups, can actually use.”
Khan has funded the business herself and has not yet launched a formal fundraising round. Self-funding, she said, was a deliberate decision “to build lean”.
“At this stage I see independence as a particularly valuable strength. It gives me the freedom to develop the work around what I believe organisations genuinely need and to speak candidly about the technologies and practices I assess,” Khan said.
However, she said she has begun engaging with the startup and investment ecosystem. Khan applied to TiE Women with a pitch deck, which exposed her to a network of people across the startup and investment community.
“I have learned the terminology along the way, become more familiar with how the investment ecosystem works, and continued to develop and sharpen my own concepts,” Khan said. “I would rather approach investors when I can show a clearer product path, stronger customer validation, and a specific reason for taking capital.”
She doesn’t see fundraising itself as a badge of success. “Capital should enable something — faster product development, market expansion, hiring, or scale,” Khan said. However, she acknowledges that mentorship and capital are not interchangeable.
Marani points out that she has seen a growing pattern of women walk away from venture capital altogether. Some female entrepreneurs either decide the amount offered isn’t worth the equity investors want in return, and others, like Khan, would rather grow more slowly or find that their values don’t align with potential investors, she explained.
“I’ve seen quite a few women saying I’ll go bootstrap,” Marani said. She also questions whether the venture capital industry’s fixation on building the next billion-dollar “unicorn” reflects what founders are actually trying to build.
“How many women do you think will go, ‘Oh, I need to be a unicorn?’” Marani said. “They just want to build a stable business.” A founder who builds a stable company, eventually exits and creates millions of dollars in wealth for herself and her family has still built something meaningful, she said. While women want to build a business that has impact, they still want to provide for their families, she explained.
“I think I am very pessimistic also because I have a 15-year-old daughter,” Marani said. “I was really hoping my daughter wouldn’t have to deal with this, but she is.”
Unnikrishnan is more optimistic. She said she has already seen more women move into entrepreneurship and expects that momentum to continue.
“I think in the next four or five years we will definitely see a lot of changes,” she said.
Source: Khaleej Times