Partner
Shorooq PartnersCheck size: No personal check range is disclosed. Shorooq's Bedaya strategy invests from pre-seed through early rounds, while the broader equity platform reaches late-stage growth. Founders should identify the relevant Shorooq vehicle instead of assuming Omer can deploy across every strategy or size.
Omer brings a hands-on operator lens from scaling Careem's commercial businesses and building mobile-money products. His investing focus is on ambitious technology founders in the UAE, Qatar and frontier markets who can prove customer pull, build high-performance teams, and turn a large regional problem into a scalable category. His public comments emphasize founder mindset, operating quality and measurable execution over polished storytelling alone.
Warm, ambitious and resilient founders; deep customer understanding; products addressing frequent or financially meaningful problems; credible local distribution; strong early retention; high-performing teams; and a path from one market to a regional platform. His experience suggests special interest in operators who understand unit economics and execution at ground level.
Inferred from his operator and public pitch commentary: founder-market mismatch, shallow understanding of the customer, weak ownership of operating metrics, growth that depends indefinitely on subsidy, and teams optimizing the pitch before proving execution. This is an inference, not a published exclusion list.
Open with the customer problem and evidence from direct observation. Show retention, frequency, contribution economics, acquisition channels and what you learned from operating the product. Explain why your team can win locally, how the playbook travels to adjacent markets, and the exact commercial or hiring bottleneck where Omer's operator experience and Shorooq's regional network can help.
Evaluate founders through observed customer behavior, operating metrics, speed of learning and the team's command of execution—not only the size of the narrative.
Start with a painful, well-understood local use case and test whether distribution, product and economics can be repeated across nearby markets without losing operational control.
Meet widely, learn deeply from a smaller group, and reserve backing for the few teams whose ambition, evidence and execution survive close engagement.
Early venture work begins with a broad founder funnel, deeper relationship-building with a smaller set, and selective conviction in a handful of companies rather than indiscriminate deployment.
Quote coverage is incomplete. Kit can look for direct comments on markets, founders, and investment criteria.
Omer Zabit is a Partner at Shorooq. Before joining, he spent over five years at Careem in commercial roles, including as global head of food delivery, and earlier worked in product and strategy roles in mobile money in Pakistan.