Venture Partner at Shorooq Partners
Check size: Shorooq invests across the equity journey from pre-seed through late-stage growth, but neither the firm nor Kunal publishes his personal check range or decision authority. Portfolio round totals are not treated as check-size evidence.
Kunal supports Shorooq's fintech and web3 practice with an operator's perspective across the UK, UAE, and Africa. His remit fits the firm's founder-first strategy: backing regional companies from idea through scale and global frontier companies where technology modernizes financial access, payments, wealth, business operations, or digital ownership. Shorooq's blockchain thesis favors crypto augmenting existing consumer behavior and solving real-world problems rather than replacing useful behavior with complexity.
Tie the product to a concrete financial or digital-economy problem in the target market. Show founder-market fit, regulation and licensing, product economics, risk controls, distribution, and evidence that customers already behave in a way the technology can improve. For web3, explain why blockchain changes ownership, settlement, access, or creator economics while keeping onboarding and payments simple.
Exceptional outlier founders, strong teams, operating depth, clear regional insight, regulated financial infrastructure, products that improve access and efficiency, existing consumer behavior enhanced by blockchain, seamless UX that hides technical complexity, and businesses with a credible path from an early regional wedge to category leadership.
No personal pass list is published. His mandate and Shorooq's stated strategy imply weaker fit for fintech without regulatory or infrastructure depth, web3 products driven only by tokens, blockchain that does not improve an existing user behavior, teams lacking local-market execution, and opportunities outside fintech/web3 where Kunal has no stated remit. These are inferred filters.
Start with a behavior users already value and show how blockchain improves ownership, verification, settlement, access, or economics without imposing avoidable complexity.
Evaluate licensing, banking and payment rails, risk, local distribution, customer trust, unit economics, and the operational plan for expansion across distinct MENA or African markets.
Map the founder's first wedge, proof milestones, follow-on capital needs, regional network effects, and path to an enduring category leader rather than a locally bounded feature.
Assess whether the team has the technical, regulatory, commercial, and operating experience required to build and manage a financial product across markets.
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