UAE Royal Family-owned tech company seeks opportunities in Israel, local presence

Tech It Forward will be the country manager for the company, which is seeking collaboration, business development, and investment opportunities between the UAE and Israeli startups.

By James Spiro, CTech

Seed Group, a UAE-based company owned by the Royal Family of Dubai and the Private Office of Sheikh Saeed bin Ahmed Al Maktoum, has appointed Israel-based Tech It Forward as its Israel Country manager.

It is understood that this appointment will provide Israeli startups with the opportunity to collaborate and invest across the UAE.

The goal of Seed Group is to offer business and technology opportunities via partnerships in the UAE. Since its establishment in 2004, the company has opened offices in 12 countries to help foster strategic partnerships and deals totaling millions of dollars, as well as managed investments worth more than $1 billion.

Israel-based ‘innovation bridge maker’ Tech It Forward will operate as the Country Manager for Seed Group to help connect startups with innovative technologies with collaborative opportunities across the regions.

It will help scout relevant Israeli technologies and startups and connect them to a new market and launchpad in the UAE. It will include investors abroad that can help accelerate business growth and bridge the Israeli startup ecosystem to the tech-oriented economy of the UAE.

”Our focus here is to concentrate on technology implementation and integration with elite companies in the UAE market and beyond,” said Tech It Forward Co-founder Jessica Rosner. “Seed Group is a prestigious and extremely efficient company and we are delighted to be working together.”

Co-founder Jennifer Elias added: ”We are extremely excited about this new collaboration and market access it will provide Israeli companies, deepening our relations with the UAE.”

Since the Abraham Accords in 2020, there has been increased collaboration between Israel and the UAE, as well as other Arab countries in the region.

In January 2022, the UAE invested $100 million into venture capital firms in Israel’s technology sector. In June, UAE-IL tech zone, a non-profit aiming to build bridges between the Emirati and Israeli tech ecosystems, sent a delegation of unicorn and late-stage startups to the UAE in partnership with Start-Up Nation Central.

Startups that will benefit from the partnership between Seed Group and Tech It Forward come from practically any sector, such as the metaverse, crypto, fintech, agri-tech, health, AI, retail, IT, robotics, education, fintech, supply chain, energy, healthcare, transportation, contract management, digital transformation, food-tech and food security, smart city, biotech, insure-tech, legal-tech, media and entertainment, ag-tech, hospitality and tourism, real estate and prop-tech, genomics, sports, delivery drones.