Advice for MENA founders from Arclight Capital’s Akash Bhojwani: the region’s biggest openings are in the regulated infrastructure nobody wants to build.
Every pitch deck in the region seems to promise a super-app. Akash Bhojwani has a different suggestion for founders: build the layer underneath instead.
“Everyone wants to build the interface. Almost nobody wants to build the boring layer, the payments, the identity, the claims settlement,” says Bhojwani, Founder and Managing Director of Arclight Capital, a Dubai-based holding and advisory firm operating across the UAE-India corridor. “But the compounding happens in the plumbing. Owning a regulated layer is the difference between building a feature and building the platform other people’s features live on.”
Bhojwani’s conviction comes from an unusual route into finance: a start in his family’s substantial retail enterprises in India, then years working on rural financial inclusion before founding Arclight. Along the way he watched wave after wave of consumer apps launch loudly and fade quietly, while the companies holding licenses and rails kept compounding.
“A license is boring until the day it is priceless,” he says.
Where the openings are
For founders in the MENA region, he sees three big openings. The first is the everything-wallet: not one more app, but a regulated wallet that disappears into other businesses, powering a retailer’s loyalty program, a gig platform’s payouts or a cooperative’s procurement. The second is agentic finance, software that does not just predict but executes, sweeping balances, releasing payments on delivery confirmation, settling claims automatically on trigger events.
The third is the rural economy, which he calls the last big unbanked industry. Roughly 75 percent of agricultural risk worldwide is uninsured, and in Asia barely one in five smallholders carries crop cover. “Insurance for farmers never failed on demand. It failed on delivery,” he says. “A premium collected in small instalments timed to the harvest, a payout that lands within hours of a failed monsoon. The technology for that exists today. Someone has to build it here.”
The corridor between the Gulf and India, with more than $85 billion in bilateral trade, gives regional founders a rare advantage: capital on one side, scale on the other, and Dubai in the middle. “Distribution comes to you if you build where the currents meet,” he says.
His parting advice is about temperament as much as strategy. “This is a space where you underwrite in years, not quarters. The founders who win in emerging markets are the ones who show up early and stay. Fast money keeps leaving. Let it. That is your moat.”
About: Akash Bhojwani is the Founder and Managing Director of Arclight Capital, a Dubai-based holding company providing strategic advisory, investment guidance and cross-border expertise across the UAE-India corridor. www.arclight.capital
