📖 This article is part 5 of wider series on “Fundraising 101 for MENA VCs” – you can check-out earlier instalments here.
Here is something that every VC we spoke to said in one form or another, unprompted, usually with the kind of weary emphasis that suggested they wished someone had told them earlier – fundraising takes longer than you think.
Not a little longer, not "add a few months to your timeline" longer – double-it longer.
It takes forever to raise a fund. Even the people with track records, as they keep scaling, as they keep trying to raise larger funds, it just takes a long time. First-time fund managers, you're probably looking at two years. If you're lucky and you have someone rich as your friend, then maybe you'll cut that down. Or your uncle gives you $10 million, great. But most people don't have that. And then Fund II will be harder, because your uncle won't give you $50 million. So you'll have no income for a year and a half, two years before you get to first close, and then after that you'll have another year and a half to get the final close. It's not fun.
Two years to first close. Another eighteen months to final close. Three and a half years of your life spent fundraising before the fund is fully capitalised, during which time you're also expected to be sourcing deals, building a team, and (in many cases) surviving on personal savings because the management fees haven't kicked in yet.
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The global data confirms this isn't hyperbole, PitchBook for example has reported that even globally the median time in market hit a record 14.7 months through Q3 2024, up from just 9.3 months in 2022.
In MENA, where the LP base is thinner and the relationship-building cycle is longer, those numbers skew even higher.
Ambar's experience with Ibtikar's Fund II puts the timeline problem in terms that no amount of aggregate data can quite capture.
We started raising Fund II during COVID and we ended during a war. It was a long and difficult process.
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