Focus Area
Aerospace
Aircraft, propulsion and aerospace systems. The fund backs the engineering underneath flight — airframes and structures, engines and electric powertrains, avionics and the test work that stands between a demonstrator and an aircraft someone is permitted to operate.
What we back.
- Aircraft and structures
- Crewed and uncrewed platforms and the structures underneath them — aerostructures, landing and actuation systems, thermal and fuel systems — where weight, fatigue life and manufacturability are settled in the first design review and paid for everywhere after it.
- Propulsion
- Gas turbines and their components, electric and hybrid powertrains, and the thermal management and power electronics around them, judged on thrust or power per kilogram, energy burn, and hours between overhauls.
- Avionics and flight systems
- Flight control, navigation, power distribution and health monitoring — software-defined where it is allowed to be, qualified hardware where it has to be, and written against the standard the certifying authority will apply.
- Ground systems and test
- What flight depends on and rarely shows: test rigs and instrumentation, inspection and overhaul, ground handling, and the systems that turn a fleet's recorded hours into a maintenance decision made before the part fails.
Why now
Why this sector, in this corridor, now.
Flight is being re-engineered in places that were closed to new entrants. Electric and hybrid propulsion, uncrewed platforms and certification routes written for smaller aircraft have made room for companies that are not primes, and the supply chain has unbundled far enough that a specialist with one qualified part can reach programs it could not have reached a decade ago. What has not changed is the discipline the sector demands: qualification is the product plan, not a stage after it.
The UAE and the wider MENA region are building aviation capability rather than only buying it — maintenance and overhaul, component manufacture, uncrewed operations and the regulatory capacity to approve them — alongside some of the busiest airspace and most punishing operating conditions anywhere. Heat, dust and utilization are design inputs here rather than edge cases, and a component proven against them has been proven somewhere difficult.
What we look for
What a company in this area has to show.
The five criteria in How We Invest apply to every opportunity. These are the questions this area adds on top of them.
A certification path with an authority named
Which authority, which rule set, which configuration first, and who on the team has taken an aircraft or a part through it before. In this sector the regulatory plan and the engineering plan are the same document, and a team that keeps them apart is carrying unpriced risk.
Mass, power and cost budgets that close
A mass and energy budget that balances before anything is cut in metal, with margin held deliberately rather than discovered late, and a unit cost calculated on the qualified supply chain rather than on the prototype one.
Test evidence from the real envelope
Hours on a rig and hours in the air, at the temperature, altitude and duty cycle the operator will fly, with the failures recorded and the design changes they forced shown rather than summarized.
Supply chain and provenance settled early
Qualified suppliers for the parts that cannot be second-sourced quickly, traceability an auditor will accept, and a view on export control for the hardware and its technical data before any cross-border structure is drawn.
Across the corridor
Why the corridor matters here.
Aerospace is a corridor business by construction: the design authority, the test capability and the certifying authority are rarely in one country, and a program that has not planned for that finds out at the worst moment. The United States holds deep propulsion, avionics and systems engineering. The UAE and the wider MENA region hold airline-scale operations, overhaul capacity, airspace that regulators are actively opening to uncrewed flight, and a willingness to qualify a new supplier rather than wait for someone else to do it first. Joining the two means mapping the export-control route and the validation path between authorities before the entity, the staffing and the test program are set, because each of those is expensive to redraw. The fund is built to do that mapping first, and to say so when a configuration cannot lawfully move.
What that support consists of in practice is set out under Capital + Capability, and how the markets are covered under Global Network.
Next
Building in Aerospace?
Founders in the United States, the UAE and MENA can submit their company for review, or read how the fund decides first.