Meet Homegrown Ventures: The Fund Betting on MENA's "Better-for-You" Founders

The Middle East and North Africa’s problem was never a shortage of capital, it was a shortage of capital that actually understands consumer brands, according to Nader Amiri and Ahmad Shamieh.

That gap is what led the two Managing Partners, both former CPG operators, to launch Homegrown Ventures, a fund built specifically around CPG. Fund I recently closed at $22.8 million, with five portfolio companies already backed ahead of the close.

We spoke with Nader and Ahmad about why generalist VC money doesn't fit consumer brands, what it actually takes to get a check from Homegrown, and what they're watching for as they deploy the rest of the fund through the end of the year.

We didn't start Homegrown because MENA lacked capital. It has plenty of capital, more than most regions actually know what to do with. What it lacked was capital that understood a consumer brand.

Most generalist funds are built on a tech model: high burn, blitz-scale, an exit multiple on revenue nobody's checked for real margin. CPG doesn't work that way, and treating it like it does is how founders end up raising the wrong money, on the wrong terms, from investors who get nervous the first time growth looks unglamorous, like a listing fee, a shelf reset, or a slow retailer payment cycle. Ahmad and I spent our careers on the other side of that table, building and fixing brand portfolios inside companies like Unilever, Coca-Cola, Kraft/Mondelez and Danone. We'd seen what a real operator brings to a boardroom, and we didn't see anyone in the region bringing that to a founder writing their first term sheet.

So the fund wasn't us spotting whitespace on a slide. It was closer to frustration, watching good, founder-led brands get either ignored by generalist VCs who didn't understand CPG gross margin dynamics, or picked over by strategics who wanted control before they'd earned the right to it. Closing at $22.8 million against a $20 million target isn't the headline for us. What matters is that we found industry LPs patient enough to underwrite a thesis that pays out over years, not quarters, because CPG doesn't reward people chasing a fast story, and that see a strategic fit to their experiences or businesses above and beyond just the capital. - Ahmad Shamieh.

We're deliberately focused: Seed to Series A, and by the time we're seriously looking, we want to see roughly $2 million to $10 million in trailing annual sales, real revenue, not a pre-order campaign or just a spreadsheet. Below that, we can't yet tell the difference between genuine consumer pull and a founder who's simply good at raising money, and those are not the same skill.

Two numbers matter more than any deck slide: gross margin, and whether the sales trend is actually moving up. Everything else, the story, the packaging, the mission, sits downstream of those two. A brand can have a beautiful narrative and still be structurally unable to make money at scale; we've passed on products we personally loved because the unit economics didn't hold once you stripped out founder-subsidized costs.

Two numbers matter more than any deck slide: gross margin, and whether the sales trend is actually moving up. Everything else, the story, the packaging, the mission, sits downstream of those two. A brand can have a beautiful narrative and still be structurally unable to make money at scale; we've passed on products we personally loved because the unit economics didn't hold once you stripped out founder-subsidized costs.

At a very high level, overall FMCG gross margin should sit around 40-50%. F&B is primarily in that same 40-50% range, though some subcategories can still be healthy at 30-40%, and others, beverage being a typical example, at 50-60%. Beauty & Personal Care should be higher, around 70-80%.

There are also a lot of common mistakes we see in how founders calculate gross margin or gross profit, and even common misconceptions about what the channel-wise gross margin should look like. A primarily D2C business should be running a higher margin, 50-60% or even 70%, because once you expand into retail, whether direct or via a distributor, that eats into margins meaningfully.

Then there's the part that doesn't fit in a model: the founder. We were operators before we were investors, so we discount pitch polish and pay attention to how someone handles a hard question about their own numbers. Brave, resilient, a little stubborn in the right places, that's the profile.

Between us and our venture partners, we ran brand portfolios worth well over a billion dollars combined inside those companies. That experience doesn't show up as a credibility line on a pitch page, it shows up in what we don't get fooled by.

We've seen a brand look strong on trade spend and terrible on repeat purchase. We've seen a great product die on a bad packaging decision, and a mediocre product win on distribution discipline. We know what a category review actually costs a small brand in time, not just money, and we know the difference between a retailer relationship that's real and one that's a single enthusiastic buyer away from disappearing.

"Better-for-you" gets used as a marketing sticker more often than it gets used honestly, and we try hard not to be part of that problem. For us it has to be true on the label, not just true in the pitch: a real, verifiable health, wellness or environmental benefit, fewer or cleaner ingredients, a functional benefit that holds up, a genuinely lower environmental footprint, not a reformulated version of the same ultra-processed category with a green box on the front.

The region has a real health cost sitting behind that filter. Diabetes and obesity rates here aren't abstractions, and a market this saturated with products claiming a benefit they can't back up isn't doing anyone favors. So the bar for us is simple: would this hold up feed our friends and family or if a nutritionist, not a brand marketer, read the ingredient list out loud? If the honest answer is no, it's not on our radar, however good the growth numbers look this quarter. - Ahmad Shamieh.

That number gets quoted a lot and understood a little. It's not just that MENA is young, it's that this generation didn't inherit its parents' brand loyalty. They grew up with a phone in hand, watched global brands market to them without really speaking to them, and are now old enough to spend their own money on brands that do.

Most large CPG companies are still organized around a consumer who is ten or fifteen years older than the one actually walking into the store, or increasingly, the one ordering on an app. That gap is where we place bets. It shows up concretely: we lean toward brands built e/q-commerce first, because that's genuinely how a 20 something-year-old in Riyadh or Dubai discovers a new product now, not through a category review at a hypermarket. It shows up in ingredient choices, dates, lupin/turmus, functional ingredients rooted in the region rather than imported wholesale from a Western wellness trend. And it shows up in who we back: founders who are of that generation, not marketing to it from the outside.

The honest caveat: a demographic tailwind doesn't make a bad brand good. It just means the ceiling on a good brand, done right, is bigger here than most global investors currently price in. - Nader Amiri.

We backed five companies before the fund officially closed, which tells you something about conviction versus paperwork, we didn't wait for a ribbon-cutting to start doing the job.

Plaay, founded by Rashi Chowdhary, makes a genuinely "clean" indulgent chocolate snack with pre- and probiotic benefits, no nasty ingredients, still tastes like a treat. It's a good example of our thesis in motion: it built its early proof online, on Noon Minutes, Talabat and Amazon, before earning its way onto shelves at Choithrams, Spinneys and Carrefour. Sequencing, not luck.

Bambuyu, founded by Sahar Karoubi, is the UAE's first stylish, high quality, and sustainable tissue brand. It's a category that's seen little to no innovation and keeps lowering the quality in search of 'price wars' in decades, which is exactly why we liked it, the biggest opportunities are often in the categories everyone's stopped paying attention to.

Gramiyaa, is a cold-pressed cooking oil brand out of India built by Sibi Manivannan (3rd generation oil maker), Mohammad Yaseen and Naveen RL; real product, real health story, and a useful early lesson for us on the packaging side, more on that below.

Tarwi Foods makes delicious and nutritious products from lupin/turmus beans, one of the richest plant-protein sources around, with a far lighter footprint than the soy the world currently depends on for most of its plant protein.

PawPots: a Lebanon-and-UAE premium pet nutrition brand doing fresh, personalized meal plans direct to consumer. Pet wellness is downstream of the same "better-for-you" instinct we're backing in human food, people extend that scrutiny to what they feed their dogs and cats now too.

Capital is the easier part to write about and the least differentiated part of what we do. The honest answer to what we bring is operating hours, the unglamorous kind.

A concrete one: with Gramiyaa, the product and the story were both strong, but the pack format didn't read instantly as cooking oil to a shopper scrolling past it online. Online it worked, but on a physical shelf, that kind of mismatch costs a season and probably a delisting conversation before anyone even notices what went wrong. Because we caught it early and treated it as a distribution problem rather than a marketing problem, it became a week of new photography, clearer copy and a corrected category listing instead of a lost year. That's the kind of mistake that looks small in hindsight and is fatal in real time if nobody who's actually run trade marketing is in the room.

More broadly, we built what we call a 5Ps playbook, pulled from our own years running brand P&Ls at scale, that we hand founders early, specifically to help them avoid the expensive errors we watched other people make for two decades. The door-opening version of value is more visible; the mistake-avoided version is usually worth more. Of course, to be grounded, we still learn from new mistakes, and the key is adapting fast to consumer and market needs. - Nader Amiri.

The honest starting point is that a decent product at a decent price is not a strategy anymore, it's a private-label brief waiting to be written by the very retailer selling it. Private label is already more than a quarter of sales at the large GCC chains, and it's moving into quick commerce too. If your only advantage is "we make this a bit better and a bit cheaper," a multinational or a retailer's own house brand will copy it within a season.

So the brands that actually win own something that can't be copied in ninety days: a real connection to local taste and ingredient heritage that a multinational's global playbook wasn't built to replicate, a community that trusts the founder's face and story rather than a logo, or a supply chain relationship that took years to build and can't be sourced around on short notice. Distribution used to be a decade-long moat for the multinationals. Online has turned it into something closer to a subscription, bad news if your only moat was shelf space, and very good news if you actually built something worth choosing.

We'd also push back gently on the framing that this is a fight. The multinationals we both came from aren't going anywhere, and some of the smartest ones are already partnering with or acquiring the local brands doing this well, rather than trying to out-innovate them internally. The winning move for a founder isn't always "beat the giant", sometimes it's "become interesting enough that the giant would rather work with you." - Ahmad Shamieh.

We're deliberately not chasing a quarterly number, and I'd be wary of any fund manager who gives you a confident one, that's usually how you end up writing checks to hit a target instead of to back a founder.

What I can say honestly: at our typical check size of roughly on average $1 million (range of $500k to $2M), a $22.8 million fund realistically supports somewhere in the range of 10-15 portfolio companies over its life, once you account for reserves for the founders who are working and deserve a follow-on check. We're five-plus companies in already. Between now and year end, our focus stays MENA first, with South Asia and a small number of select global markets where the thesis holds, meaning a genuine better-for-you story and a founder we'd bet on, not just a market we haven't touched yet.

We have a done deal already that we plan to announce soon and aim for another 2-3 by H2 '26. If the right founder and proposition walks in during Q1 next year instead, that's fine too. Pace is a vanity metric in this asset class; return isn't. - Nader Amiri.

Three to five years out, success isn't a single exit we point to and declare victory, CPG doesn't work on that kind of timeline, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling a story, not running a fund. What we actually want to see: most of the portfolio still standing and healthy, several of them with strong enough gross margins and repeat-purchase numbers that they're raising real growth or Series A/B capital from investors who no longer need us to explain the category to them.

Somewhere in that window, we'd like at least one or two credible acquisition conversations, not necessarily closed, but real, from strategics who see a brand worth owning rather than worth crushing. And honestly, the proof point we care about most isn't a headline multiple. It's whether founders who didn't take our money hear from the ones who did that we were worth having on the cap table, that we did what we said we would when the numbers were flat and the shelf reset didn't go their way. In this business, reputation compounds faster than any single return, and it's the only asset that survives a bad vintage. - Ahmad Shamieh.

Interview conducted by Arabian Aisles.