UAE invests $100 million in Israel's tech sector
Investment a sign of increasing business ties more than a year since signing of Abraham Accords
A major sovereign-wealth fund in the United Arab Emirates invested around $100 million in Israeli venture-capital firms in the technology sector, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The financial commitment from Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment represents a deepening of economic and business ties more than a year after the Abraham Accords normalized relations between the two countries.
Israeli-Emirati trade is forecasted to reach $2 billion this year, an increase from roughly $250 million annually before the establishment of diplomatic ties, according to the UAE-Israel Business Council, a trade group representing 6,000 Israeli and Emirati businesspeople.
"The Abraham Accords has kind of changed the paradigm of business and trade with the Arab world," Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, Jerusalem's deputy mayor and co-founder of the UAE-Israel Business Council, told i24NEWS.
Hassan-Nahoum cited as an example an increase in Israel's trade with Jordan and Egypt, two countries that signed peace deals with the Jewish state decades ago.
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Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan also normalized relations with Israel as part of the Abraham Accords.
According to the WSJ report, Mubadala, which manages $250 billion in assets, invested up to $20 million in six VC firms based in Israel or with an Israeli focus, including Mangrove Capital Partners, Entrée Capital, Aleph Capital, Viola Ventures, Pitango, and MizMaa.
Israeli companies are also investing in Abu Dhabi and Dubai and moving staff there from Tel Aviv.
"Dubai is a very important hub to Africa, to Asia, to the whole east side of the globe. It really is a gateway and is tax-free, so there is a lot of incentives, a lot of really good reasons why Israeli companies would want to start the distribution of their products to the east from the hub that is Dubai," Hassan-Nahoum said.
"2020 was the year of the [Abraham Accords] signing, 2021 was the year where we built the infrastructure for the future... and I think 2022 is going to be the year of real business and true normalization."