CASE STUDY | ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Beyond Careem: How Sheraa’s founders discovered what Scaling actually requires

The Challenge

The Call from Sharjah

The Sharjah corniche

Here’s how this started: In December 2025, Sheraa, the UAE’s leading government-backed entrepreneurship center*, reached out with an urgent mission. They had 21 of their most promising founders from the prestigious S3 cohort who needed to understand what investor readiness actually means……and fast.

*Under the visionary guidance of H.H. Sheikha Bodour bint Sultan Al Qasimi (Chairperson), H.E. Najla Al Midfa (Vice Chairperson), H.E. Sara Abdelaziz Al Nuaimi (CEO), Abeer AlAmeeri, Director of Ecosystem Development, and their dedicated team, Sheraa has emerged as a cornerstone institution for entrepreneurship in the region.

The timing was critical. The Sharjah Entrepreneurship Festival (SEF) 2026 was just weeks away on January 31st – February 1st 2026, bringing together 16,000+ attendees, 300+ global speakers, and hundreds of investors. Sheraa’s founders needed to arrive not just with polished pitches, but with clear awareness of what investors actually look for, and honest understanding of the gaps they needed to close.

Hessa Abdalla, Programs Associate at Sheraa, outlined 3 core areas:

1. From Product to Growth: Building and scaling what customers love, focused on refining the product or service while applying growth-driven, data-informed strategies to acquire and retain customers.
2. Fundraising & Investor Readiness: A practical session covering pitching, fundraising strategy, capital readiness, and what investors look for at this stage.
3. Building Corporate & Strategic Partnerships: Focused on identifying, approaching, and managing collaborations with corporates and ecosystem partners to support validation and scale.

But Sheraa’s leadership understood something critical: these founders needed more than tips and templates. They needed to viscerally experience the complexity of scaling; to see what they didn’t know, and understand why it mattered.

“For SEF 2026, we want our founders to have well-researched, and comprehensive discussions with the investors that they’re going to meet. Discussions that reflect their long-term growth and capital raising strategy,” Hessa emphasized.

The unspoken reality: most of these founders weren’t yet ready for those conversations. The masterclass would help them understand why.

The Persistent MENA Challenge: Founders Who Don’t Scale

The challenges Sheraa identified aren’t unique to their cohort; they’re systemic across MENA. Despite an explosion of early-stage entrepreneurship activity, the region still struggles with founders making the leap from startup to scale-up.

The numbers tell the story:

• Seed-to-Series A conversion in MENA: ~7% vs. global averages of 10-14%
• Limited growth-stage capital ($25M-$100M rounds)
• Shallow track record of breakout successes
• Few large IPOs and M&A exits

But perhaps most critical is what doesn’t show up in the data: the invisible knowledge gap.

Most MENA founders don’t know what sophisticated scaling actually requires. They’ve raised SAFE notes without fully understanding the terms. They’ve built cap tables without modeling dilution through multiple rounds. They’ve pitched investors without grasping what drives valuation multiples.

It’s not lack of ambition or hustle. It’s lack of exposure to what the scaling journey actually looks like, the financial modeling, the strategic decision-making, the term sheet negotiation, the multi-round dilution management that separates startups from scale-ups.

Challenge accepted. This is exactly what Strategy Tools stands for: making the invisible visible, showing founders what they don’t know exists in the MENA startup ecosystem.

Impact & Outcomes

The Masterclass That Revealed Reality

The outcome? A curated 2-day masterclass designed for early-stage founders ranging from ‘I have never raised’ to ‘I raised a SAFE note but don’t fully understand the terms.’.

Across the 2 days, we noticed a persistent challenge that kept popping up: MENA founders lack the strategy and the math that gets them to scale.

This isn’t a criticism; it’s a structural gap. And it’s exactly what Scale Up! MENA is designed to reveal.

DAY 2: The Gap Becomes Undeniable

Scaling, not just starting, was the key theme of Day 2. The complexity accelerated:

• Later-stage investors with sophisticated term sheets
• Market expansion decisions across 35+ potential markets
• Board management and strategic partnerships
• Advanced terms: liquidation preferences, anti-dilution, drag-along rights

Amazon, Softbank, Mubadala, PIF, BECO Capital, Nuwa Capital, and White Summit Capital entered as potential later-stage investors.

The Strategic Fluency Gap

Day 2 revealed the most critical gap: strategic financial fluency.

Teams struggled to:

• Model out dilution across multiple rounds
• Evaluate trade-offs between valuation and terms
• Understand how liquidation preferences impact exit scenarios
• Plan market expansion with financial implications in mind
• Build cap tables that could survive 6-8 rounds and still deliver founder value

This isn’t something you master in two days. But seeing it, experiencing the struggle, recognizing you lack the fluency; that’s the breakthrough.

The Breakthrough: From “I Know” to “Now I See What I Need to Learn”

There’s a moment in every Scale Up MENA! masterclass where the energy shifts. It happened around mid-Day 2.

Teams stopped asking basic questions like “What does this term mean?”

They started asking strategic questions: “If we accept this liquidation preference, how does it affect our exit scenarios? Should we prioritize the investor with better terms or better connections? If we expand to Turkey now versus later, how does that change our ARR trajectory and next round valuation?”

This is the breakthrough. Not mastery. Awareness. Founders glimpsed what strategic thinking at scale looks like. They saw the sophistication required. And they recognized they didn’t yet possess it.

For the Sheraa cohort, this moment crystallized around the Careem benchmark.

The Careem Benchmark: Ambition Meets Reality

Throughout the masterclass, we anchored on one benchmark: Careem’s $3.1B exit to Uber.

When we challenged teams: “Can you build a path to exceed Careem’s exit valuation?” it wasn’t just about numbers. It was about understanding what that level of success requires.

In simulation, Team 4 (Wiwo Bank) exceeded it. Team 3 (ArabicaAI) came close.

• Team 4: Wiwo Bank – $5.14B exit valuation through strategic M&A
• Team 3: ArabicaAI – $2.97B exit with strong investor returns
• Team 1: Ammensa – $1.2B exit with preserved founder ownership

But here’s what mattered more than the simulation outcomes: founders saw what it takes.

They experienced the decision-making, the strategic trade-offs, the financial modeling, the multi-round cap table management required to build toward that scale.

And they recognized: In simulation, we struggled with facilitator support. In reality, we’d need deep capability to execute this.

Reality Check: Investor Readiness Assessment

We concluded with each team presenting their:

• Exit strategy and rationale
• Cap table composition and strategic choices
• Path to valuation achieved
• Most importantly: What they discovered they don’t know

The final presentations revealed significant gaps:

• Vague value propositions that wouldn’t resonate with sophisticated investors
• Financial models that lacked the rigor later-stage investors expect
• Pitch narratives that focused on product, not growth strategy or market opportunity
• Limited understanding of how to position for specific investor types

This wasn’t failure. This was success.

Success looks like founders walking out aware of what investor readiness actually requires, and motivated to build that capability.

Facilitator Notes: Chris Rangen

Having run Scale Up! globally, we have seen what ‘great founders’ look like. With 1000’s of founders from Asia-pacific, Africa, North America, Latin America, Europe and MENA; we have developed a global benchmark of what the very best founders can achieve.

In MENA, we still see a young and emerging ecosystem. Fundamental skills are developing. Term sheet literacy is rising. Founders are starting to learn the ins and outs of SAFE notes and convertibles. The best MENA founders understand how to optimize the cap table for long-term success, selecting the right investors, with the right instruments and the right terms.

This, of course, is what panned out in the Scale Up MENA! Masterclass. It is not an easy environment to master.

Just like in real life, founders are pushed, they are challenged, terms are punitive, sometimes unclear, always with long-term consequences.

What we saw in the Masterclass echoes what we see across the ecosystem. We are learning, maturing, developing. Yet, much work remains to compete with the best founders around the world. From growth strategies, fundraising, cap table management and investor readiness, the MENA ecosystem is getting built step by step, inch by inch, and our Scale Up MENA! cohort got to experience that in full.

Looking ahead, we are confident this experience will boost the real-life fundraising work these founders are going to close.

Facilitator Notes: Sanjana Raheja

1. The S3 Cohort: Ambitious, Committed, and Facing Reality

What struck us about the Sheraa masterclass was the caliber of the cohort. These weren’t fresh, inexperienced founders. The S3 program attracts entrepreneurs who have demonstrated traction.

We met:

• Founders with first customers and early revenue
• Teams that had raised SAFE notes (though with limited understanding of terms)
• Entrepreneurs tackling complex problems in edtech, manufacturing, fintech, logistics
• Leaders committed to building in the UAE and scaling across MENA

This made for an engaged, motivated audience, but also one whose knowledge gaps were more concerning. Precisely because they’re further along the journey.

And this something we’ve consistently noticed in MENA: the disconnect between progress and capability is stark.

2. Team Dynamics and the Solo Founder Challenge

One unexpected challenge: by Day 2, some teams had members leave, creating solo founders who struggled to manage the complexity.

This paves way for an incredible lesson: Complete, committed teams matter. Not just for the simulation, but for the real journey.

3. The Financial Modeling Gap

In my experience facilitating, MENA’s founders typically come across a significant challenge: financial models need significant facilitator support.

This isn’t about spreadsheet skills. It’s about:

• Understanding which variables matter
• Modeling scenarios and trade-offs
• Thinking multiple rounds ahead
• Connecting financial decisions to strategic outcomes

This gap needs urgent, sustained attention. Without financial fluency, founders can’t have sophisticated conversations with growth-stage investors.

4. Pitch Quality Needs Serious Work

Typically, when founders stem from Sheraa’s cohort, there is an automatic stamp of approval on the quality of their strong products and genuine traction. That’s the Sheraa impression in MENA and beyond.

At the same time, it’s the founder pitches that add to this credibility. When we hosted a pitch session on Day 2, here are some of the points that founders found themselves needing to critically address:

• Vague on value proposition
• Product-focused rather than market/growth-focused
• Lacking financial rigor investors expect
• Missing the narrative arc that resonates with sophisticated capital

In summary, day 2’s pitches delivered an eye-opener on the needed dedicated work before SEF 2026 and beyond.

Growth Strategy Was Reactive, Not Proactive

Teams approached market expansion, advisor selection, and partnership decisions somewhat randomly. Testing options until something worked, rather than building strategic frameworks.

In the debrief, founders acknowledged: “We need to be much more clear and intentional about our growth strategy.”

Strategic planning is a muscle. It requires practice, frameworks, and mentorship to develop.

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The SEF 2026 Context: Urgency Meets Opportunity

The timing created unique energy. These founders weren’t just learning for learning’s sake; they were preparing for real investor conversations in weeks.

SEF 2026 would bring:

• Hundreds of investors actively looking for deals
• Major regional VCs holding office hours
• Corporate partners exploring strategic investments
• Media coverage amplifying success stories

The stakes were real. And founders felt it.

This urgency transformed the masterclass from “interesting training” into “critical diagnostic”; revealing exactly what they needed to work on before those high-stakes conversations.

Why Sharjah’s Investment Matters

Running this in Sharjah felt significant.

Sharjah has positioned itself as a comprehensive hub for entrepreneurship and innovation, blending culture, technology, and entrepreneurship in ways distinct from Dubai’s finance-first approach or Abu Dhabi’s capital-driven model.

Sheraa, as the government-backed entrepreneurship engine, has:

• Supported 677 startups
• Empowered 917 founders
• Generated AED 2.019B in startup revenue
• Raised over AED 1.133B in capital
• Built 170+ ecosystem partnerships

And SEF has become the region’s largest entrepreneurship gathering: 15,000+ attendees, 300+ speakers, 45+ countries.

Sheraa’s willingness to invest in deep capability-building, not just capital or space, signals ecosystem sophistication. They understand that sustainable scale requires sustained capability development.

The House of Wisdom, Sharjah

Conclusion: The journey begins now

The purpose of Scale Up MENA! is to positively contribute to founders getting better at navigating the founder’s journey, from foundational equity through SAFE notes, cap table management, multi-round fundraising, and ultimately exit strategy.

What we saw in the first-ever Sheraa x Scale Up MENA! masterclass confirms that, the MENA ecosystem has tremendous talent and ambition. What’s been missing is exposure to the tactical, strategic, and financial fluency required to scale, and safe spaces to discover those gaps before they become expensive real-world mistakes.

In just 48 hours:

• 21 founders didn’t become experts, they discovered what expertise requires
• 4 teams didn’t master scaling, they experienced its complexity firsthand
• 1 team exceeded Careem’s exit in simulation, showing what’s possible with the right strategy
• Founders walked away not with confidence, but with informed awareness and motivation to build capability

The simulation outcomes were impressive. But they happened with facilitator support, in a compressed timeline, without real-world consequences.

The real companies? They now understand that similar outcomes require sustained capability-building:

• Financial modeling fluency that sophisticated investors expect
• Strategic planning frameworks that guide multi-year scaling decisions
• Term sheet literacy that enables confident negotiation
• Cap table management skills that preserve founder value through multiple rounds

As these founders headed into SEF 2026, they wouldn’t arrive with polished overconfidence. They’d arrive with something more valuable: informed questions, awareness of what investors actually evaluate, and humility about where they need to develop.

But perhaps most importantly: they now know what they don’t know.

The Scale Up MENA! Masterclass was the diagnostic.

And that’s the difference: not transformation in 48 hours, but clarity about what transformation actually requires.

Do You Want to Bring Scale Up MENA! to Your Ecosystem?