The Red Sea Farms invested USD 10 million venture capital from a group of leading Saudi and UAE investors. The Red Sea Farms Company is a Saudi Arabian agrotechnology business whose first of its kind technology enables the commercial farming of produce using primarily saltwater. This investment is one of the region's largest agrotechnology investments to date, and reflects the cooperation between investors and the growing interest in the region to invest in sustainable agricultural solutions that can combat epidemics and global supply chain disruptions. The investment is led by a group of Saudi and UAE investors including the Aramco entrepreneurship arm Wa'ed, the non-profit foundation Future Investment Initiative (FII)Institute, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and Global Ventures, a UAE venture capital group. The CEO of Wa'ed, Wassim Basrawi said that the Red Sea Farms investment reflects Wa'ed's one-decade-long commitment to the Saudi start-up sector, where Wa'ed has deployed more than $100 million in venture capital investments and loans to more than 100 entrepreneurs. For his part, the CEO of Future Investment Initiative (FII) Institute Richard Attias said that the investment in Red Sea Farms is an expression of FII Institute's mission to support initiatives and projects which will have a positive impact on humanity through a strategy that is based on three pillars of implementation think, act, and exchange. The Vice President of Innovation and Economic Development at KAUST, Kevin Cullen said that the university is powering an emerging deep-tech start-up ecosystem in Saudi Arabia –and Red Sea Farms is pushing in this direction, considering this start-up company is the product of many years of research in KAUST labs, now commercialized and ready to change the face of agriculture in the region.
