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Coffee with Medea Nocentini, senior partner at Global Ventures and C3 Founder: Nocentini (LinkedIn) is a senior partner at Dubai-based international venture capital firm Global Ventures (GV). She is also a founder of C3, a sustainability-driven accelerator focused on scaling up projects contributing to net zero goals. C3 is backed by HSBC, Accenture, Standard Chartered, Google, DMCC, Engie, and Multichoice.
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We sat down with Nocentini to discuss the sustainable VC landscape in the region, touching on what obstacles industry startups face, which subsectors are pulling in the most financing, the startup valley of death, and what the future holds.
Edited excerpts of our conversation follow.
Enterprise: Tell us a bit about your current roles in GV and C3?
Medea Nocentini: As a senior partner at GV, I currently sit on the investment committee and am very involved with the portfolio, overseeing all the different functions and working with the other partners.
I’m the founder of C3, which launched in 2012, and has since evolved into an operator of accelerators focusing on impact-driven founders and startups. We always look for companies that contribute to at least one of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), but are very commercial too. We believe those two aspects are absolutely aligned in a good business model.
E: What areas do you prioritize?
MN: We anticipate a move towards resource efficiency across sectors in emerging markets like supply chain, agritech, and energy. GV’s most recent Fund III is strategically aligned with industries that are set for technological transformation over the next decade.
Given the dynamic entrepreneurial activity in these regions, we primarily focus on emerging markets within MENA and Africa, with a particular emphasis on the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. We also remain committed to our core focus areas — fintech, healthtech, and SaaS — and continue to explore new and exciting opportunities as they emerge.
For C3, the focus is also on emerging markets with a similar sector focus of the startups we support in our accelerator programs, including health, education, environment, and financial empowerment.
E: How do you think VCs play a role in regional sustainable innovation?
MN: We need to consider that each VC has its own strategy, depending on what was promised to their investors. So when it comes to a generic sustainability question, I’ll say there is definitely an increased focus on ESG. I always visualize it as either a vertical or horizontal focus.
The vertical focus on ESG could be linked to the strategy of the fund or the firm. This is not the case at GV, we are sector-agnostic. When we say horizontal ESG, that means the focus is on being a responsible company, or helping a portfolio to be a responsible company by not harming the environment or society, or by having stronger governance.
We try to ensure they look at sustainability, diversity, and inclusion practices. The beauty of this work is that young startups are very willing to adopt those practices. That’s encouraging because I expected more resistance when we started this work three or four years ago. Ultimately, they want to ensure they do no harm because they realize that those are business risks that can jeopardize a company.
Another driver of sustainable innovation is that startups have limited access to capital, considering how little is invested in early innovation ideas in the region vs the US. That makes them more frugal because they find ways to do things using less water, less energy, and more renewable energy. In some parts of Africa, we see that tendency just because energy is very expensive.
E: What subsectors of the industry do you see attracting the most investments?
MN: There is not one that will prevail. I think it will be a combination of things, and that’s why the region has a very long-term outlook. We can think about the challenges [facing the region] to get an idea — of how to store energy and how to access critical energy transition materials — and what makes sense for the region, such as solar power since we have an abundance of sun or agri/water tech since MENA is extremely water stressed. But there is not one technology that should prevail, and if one does, it is probably just because it makes better returns, but they are all fairly capital-intensive.
Some companies are sustainable by design and play a role in the landscape rather than directly addressing energy. For example, we have a company in our portfolio called Iyris that has patented a set of technologies to grow crops in the desert with salt water and natural light, which is almost magic. Immensa is another one that basically started as software to manage the 3D printing of spare parts in the oil and gas industry. Under traditional value and supply chains, those parts are produced abroad, and you need to order months in advance to then store them. That process consumes a lot of energy on its own. So this company is inadvertently saving a lot of energy by allowing companies to print their own parts using a digital library, so essentially, not all sustainability solutions are obvious.
On AI, we know that AI and data centers are very energy-intensive, so I wonder if that will affect the trends I just described. What’s promising is that there are so many more solutions coming up that are energy-efficient at a data center level, but it’s all very new, so we’ll have to see how it goes. Maybe the government will provide the infrastructure for AI, and then, for a bit, we will consume more energy than what we do now before reversing the increase using more advanced applications. Everybody wants to reduce energy consumption, so solutions are inevitable, I’m just unsure about the timing.
E: Clean tech globally has been dealing with what many call the “Valley of Death” as they struggle to reach series B funding and investors lack confidence. Do you see this changing moving forward?
MN: Frankly, the valley of death is a problem across sectors, not just cleantech. But generally, for VC, the best time to get money is when the scalability is near or already achieved. The best time is when the company has either software attached to their solution that can scale easily, or they have a license in business. That could mean that they have already patented, tested, and tried their solution and are at the stage where they can license it to other manufacturers and distributors. What startups sometimes struggle with is going to the right source of funding and at the right moment of their growth to combine grants, corporate investments, private equity, and VC in the best way possible.
If the solution is still patent-pending, the first source of funding should be grants or strategic corporate investors. VCs will rarely inject money into a company that still needs a few years to patent their product, so having grant-style funding for this technology in these stages is fundamental, and that’s why the top countries with many techs in these stages — like Norway, Sweden, the UK, and the US — have very big grant programs in place.
Another issue for companies that might deter investors is being capex intensive. The typical VC business model expects returns for investors over 5 to 10 years, so a company that needs longer [time] to reach scale is not VC material. Bigger conglomerates or private equity might be better suited to consider those kinds of investments.
Regionally-speaking, the valley of death means that if a startup wants to survive, it will have to look abroad for capital, but I think this will change over the next decade.
E: Are there any key differences between how that manifests regionally versus, let’s say, in the West?
MN: Here, we have less VC and private equity capital than in the West across sectors. In 2023, we invested USD 6 bn at a VC level across the region, but that’s equivalent to just one transaction in Silicon Valley. We’re just scratching the surface.
For the West, it’s probably important to distinguish between the US and Europe. Europe has so many fragmented legislative bodies and much stricter rules and regulations than almost anywhere else. I’m unsure about the US, but I know the environment is volatile, and the recent election can change a lot. Comparatively, I think MENA is very promising. It’s much less complex to achieve things here, and we can go faster.
E: We’re glad to hear the optimism about where the region is heading.
MN: I’ve been here for 12 years and would have never imagined such progress and innovation, so what we’ve achieved is mesmerizing. USD bns have already been invested in alternative energy here so I am excited. It’s no longer a niche conversation.
E: What is the outlook for Global Ventures and C3 over the next 10 years?
MN: Over the next decade, we will deepen our commitment to supporting founders in emerging markets, driving transformative change across MENA and Africa. Solutions from and for the frontier will continue to attract global investor backing, not only due to the vast growth and untapped market potential in these economies, but also the innovative, resource-efficient approaches local founders bring to addressing global societal challenges. Both Global Ventures and C3 are dedicated to fostering a more collaborative ecosystem, providing founders with the essential resources, capital, knowledge, and networks needed to succeed.
