Dubai Angel Investors - VC, Private Equity and Real Estate

BECO Capital, an investment firm based in Dubai, and a consortium of angel investors announced investing $1 million in the hotel booking website TravelerVIP.com.

The website offers its members up to 50% discount on luxury hotels and has deals with 1,000 hotels. The angel investors in this round included Soha Nashaat, former CEO of Barclays Wealth MENA & Turkey, and Jakob Beck Thomsen, CEO of SaxoBank MENA & Turkey.

BECO Capital is listed in the Middle East Investors Directory with the code SINOC9.

More details follows

The only thing as hot as launching a group buying website in the Middle East: launching a startup incubator / seed fund.

Tenmou, which calls itself a "business angels' company" and had a soft launch a couple of months ago, just announced its official launch with an initial start up capital of $2.7 million.

Tenmou joins a relatively long (and young) list of incubators and seed funds from the region like Oasis500, Seeqnce and SeedStartup. We sincerely hope they end up in a better place than similar firms like Intilaq, a business incubator launched by Bayt.com, which died very early; very quietly.

More details about Tenmou follows:

Interactive Ventures Holdings (IV Holdings), in partnership with other Jordanian and Egyptian angel investors, concluded an investment in Gate2Play, a Jordan and Egypt based venture that is deploying an online payment and support platform.

IV Holdings, a wholly owned subsidiary of Accelerator Technology Holdings, provides capital to entrepreneurs both within and outside the Arab world.

To see more investment firms like IV Holdings check our investors directory

Their full press release follows

TechCrunch, a major Tech website, has an interview with Fadi Ghandour, one of the most notable angel investors from Dubai and the Middle East.

Fadi was one of the first investors in Maktoob— an internet portal that was sold to Yahoo last year for $164 million. Recently, he’s made 14 other investments, including bets on Asuaq, Jeeran and Twitvid.

Read more details here

Yahoo! just announced that it has acquired Maktoob.com, the major online community in the Arab world for an undisclosed amount. The tech publications paidContent and TechCrunch are reporting the deal in the $75 million to $85 million range. - Update: It is $164 million

(Maktoob.com was founded in 2000 as the world's first free Arabic/English Web-based email service and grow to a major portal with 16.5 million unique users.)

From a private equity and venture capital perspective, in 2000 Maktoob received $2.5 million investment from EFG-Hermes, a regional investment bank. In 2005, Dubai-based Abraaj Capital purchased a 40 per cent stake in the company in a deal estimated to have valued Maktoob at about $10 million. At the end of 2007, Abraaj sold its stake to another Maktoob investor, Tiger Global Management, a US-based hedge fund.

You can check their microsite on maktoob.yahoo.com for more details about the deal.