Inside the Gulf’s Emerging Secondaries Market: A New Route to Liquidity

Investors, founders and early backers in the Gulf are increasingly turning to a nascent secondaries market to access liquidity as traditional exits slow. Electronic market data shows Gulf secondary-market turnover rising from $22 billion in 2022 to $40 billion in 2025, while issuance climbed from $246 billion to $452 billion and average electronic trade sizes increased from roughly $500,000 to $900,000 over the same period. Regional venture activity also picked up: startups raised $3.8 billion across 688 deals in 2025.

"Secondary transactions have been happening in the region for several years, but many of them have not been publicly captured," says Kholoud Alharbi, partnership lead at Endeavor Saudi Arabia. "As companies raise larger rounds, there are often opportunities for existing investors, founders, or employees to sell part of their holdings to incoming investors."

Industry participants say that tighter global liquidity and a slowdown in IPOs and M&A deals are creating demand for dedicated secondary funds. Basil Moftah, co-founder and managing partner of Abu Dhabi-based Key Capital, estimates the regional secondaries market at around $1 billion even as global secondaries transaction volumes reached a record $240 billion in 2025. Moftah launched Key Capital last year with co-founder Leena Khalil to provide direct and structured liquidity solutions across MENA and EMEA, targeting stakeholders from founders and employees to early investors and fund managers.

Key Capital has moved to formalize that effort: in May it entered a strategic partnership with SHUAA Capital to support development of the VC secondaries market, and its Key Fund I is targeting a $50 million fund size. The vehicle will buy secondary stakes directly from existing shareholders without appearing on company capitalization tables, a structure aimed at smoothing private liquidity while limiting public signaling.

How players are approaching deals

• Sector focus: fintech, e-commerce, edtech, proptech, insuretech, SaaS and AI, with particular interest in the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
• Company profile: often Series B or later, generating $25 million to as much as $100 million in revenue, growing 30%–50% year-on-year.
• Profitability stance: typically not yet profitable but nearing profitability and market-leading within their sub-sector.
• Pricing: Moftah says meaningful purchase discounts to net asset value (NAV) average 35%–45% in the region, compared with 5%–15% for high-quality buyout fund interests in the U.S.

"As someone who has worked in VC investing for a long time, I started to become very aware of the liquidity struggle," Moftah says. He adds that demand for liquidity spans the private-company lifecycle—from Series A through late-stage—and that Key Capital is already seeing interest from Gulf sovereigns, institutional investors and family offices.

Some regional investors have already shifted allocations toward secondaries. Saudi family office Al Muhaidib Group has increased its allocations to LP-led secondary funds over the past two years, citing faster cash flows and reduced blind-pool risk as global private equity distributions slow. Key Capital also reports inbound interest from companies in the U.K. and Europe seeking liquidity not available in their home markets.

Outlook: market participants expect the Gulf secondaries ecosystem to deepen as more dedicated funds, strategic partnerships and investor education take root. Moftah says the opportunity resembles early U.S. secondaries growth after 2008 and views being an early player as both a sourcing advantage and an educational challenge: "There are lots of lucrative deals on the table," he says, "but being first also means that there's an educational element whereby we are spending time with limited partners and investors to help them understand why the secondary opportunity is meaningful."