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§ Private Profile · Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Zest Equity is a technology company.
Zest Equity has raised $8.3M across 2 funding rounds.
Key people at Zest Equity.
Zest Equity has raised $8.3M in total across 2 funding rounds.
Zest Equity provides digital infrastructure to streamline private market transactions. The company's platform simplifies deal execution, safeguards capital, and optimizes financial flows. By offering standardized tools, Zest Equity enhances efficient interaction and communication among all involved parties, improving transparency and velocity.
Rawan Baddour and Zuhair Shamma co-founded Zest Equity in 2021, driven by the insight that private markets lacked standardized digital processes. This observation spurred the development of a comprehensive platform, evolving from an initial focus on secondary trading, to digitize and formalize transactional workflows for all stakeholders.
The platform serves founders, venture capitalists, and investors across private markets. Zest Equity envisions establishing the foundational digital layer for these operations, fostering a more interconnected and accessible ecosystem. The company aims to provide essential infrastructure that drives efficiency and security in global private capital transactions.
Zest Equity has raised $8.3M across 2 funding rounds. Most recently, it raised $4.3M Zest Technologies DIFC - Pre-Series A in April 2025.
| Date | Round | Lead Investors | Other Investors | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 28, 2025 | $4.3M Seed Plus | Prosus Ventures | Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners | Announced |
| Oct 1, 2023 | $4M Seed | Walid Mansour | 500 Falcons, 500 Global, Y Combinator, Dash Ventures, Dubai Future District Fund | Announced |
Zest Equity has raised $8.3M in total across 2 funding rounds.
Zest Equity's investors include Prosus Ventures, Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners, Walid Mansour, 500 Falcons, 500 Global, Y Combinator, DASH Ventures, Dubai Future District Fund.
Key people at Zest Equity.
Zest Equity is a UAE-based fintech company founded in 2021 that builds a digital platform to streamline private market transactions, enabling founders, investors, funds, and employees to execute deals efficiently without paperwork.[1][3][4][5] It serves financial professionals, fund managers, institutional investors, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists by solving the pain points of manual, opaque, and costly offline processes through automated onboarding, documentation, fund transfers, and dedicated dashboards.[1][2][4][5] The platform creates investment vehicles like SPVs, provides regulated escrow for secure fund handling, and facilitates secondary share trades, with strong growth including 65% revenue increase from 2022 to 2023 and $3.8M in seed funding led by MEVP.[2][5]
Zest Equity was founded in 2021 by Rawan Baddour, a former banking executive, and Zuhair Shamma in Dubai's DIFC, initially as a marketplace for secondary trading amid a lack of digitized infrastructure for private market stakeholders.[1][3][5] The idea emerged from the tedium of offline transactions—tedious communication, obscure processes, and high costs—forcing founders and VCs to handle everything manually.[5] It quickly pivoted to a comprehensive platform automating deals, gaining early traction with tools for fundraising invites, cap table sharing, and syndicate formation, backed by $3.8M seed from MEVP, DFDF, and DASH Ventures to expand into Africa, South Asia, and Turkey.[1][5]
Zest Equity rides the wave of private market digitization in emerging regions, where a $920B addressable market lacks efficient liquidity and transparency, positioning UAE as a top jurisdiction.[3][5] Timing aligns with maturing Middle East startups seeking secondary trades amid longer VC cycles and "PE-ification" trends, where VCs adopt private equity strategies for liquidity.[4] Market forces like rising VC activity, regulatory support in DIFC, and global fintech adoption favor it, as manual processes hinder scaling; Zest influences the ecosystem by standardizing transactions, boosting founder-investor connections, and enabling capital flows to underserved areas like North Africa and Turkey.[1][5]
Zest Equity is poised to dominate private market infrastructure in emerging economies, expanding tools for secondary liquidity and global deal-making with its recent funding fueling growth into high-potential regions.[1][5] Trends like AI-driven automation, regulatory harmonization, and demand for transparent secondaries will accelerate its trajectory, potentially evolving into a full-stack marketplace influencing UAE's fintech hub status. As private markets mature, Zest's tech-first approach will unlock liquidity for a maturing startup ecosystem, reinforcing its role in efficient, digitized transactions from day one.[3][4][5]
