The Middle East’s venture capital ecosystem has undergone a clear transformation over the past three to four years. Capital has increased, but more importantly, the companies attracting funding have changed in scale, ambition, and complexity.
In 2025, MENA emerged as the fastest-growing venture market among emerging ecosystems, with funding rising 74% year-on-year to $3.8 billion. Saudi Arabia and the UAE attracted the majority of that capital, with FinTech, enterprise software and AI leading investment activity.
Many of the companies now seeking senior leaders are at Series B and beyond. They are managing established revenues, larger teams, and growing delivery expectations from both investors and national economic agendas. As a result, leadership requirements and compensation structures are evolving quickly.
The rise of the “Builder Leader”
As companies move from build to scale, they require leaders who can combine founder level agility with operational discipline. At Heidrick & Struggles, we describe these executives as “Builder Leaders”.
What defines a “Builder Leader”?
- Visionary ownership: Anticipating market shifts and personally driving the translation of strategy into sustainable growth.
- Decisive execution: Strong bias for action, delivering momentum and outcomes while building systems that endure beyond immediate challenges.
- Innovation in action: Willingness to challenge conventional approaches and experiment across products, processes and customer strategies to unlock new growth.
- Talent magnetism: Ability to attract, inspire and retain high-performing teams by creating environments where ambitious people thrive.
These profiles are rare globally, and competition for them in the Middle East has intensified considerably. Our research found that only around a third of Middle East leaders feel confident in their organization’s ability to attract, develop, and retain the leadership talent it needs a gap that has become more consequential as the ambitions of the region’s venture ecosystem have grown.
How leadership compensation is shifting
Based on our placement experience across the region’s VC-backed ecosystem, senior leadership packages have changed materially over the past three to four years.
One of the clearest indicators of the market’s maturation is the growing prevalence of long-term ownership stakes. Executives are increasingly being offered a meaningful stake in the businesses they are being asked to scale. This shift moves senior hiring from a transactional exchange to a partnership, and signals to prospective leaders that the company believes in what it is creating.
At the director and VP level, base salaries have settled at around AED 750k per annum (p.a.) (approx. USD 200k p.a.), increasingly supplemented by ownership arrangements that vest over time at a notional annual value of around AED 500-650k p.a. (approx. USD 163-177k p.a.). At the C-Suite level where base salaries run from AED 900k to 1.1m p.a.(approx. USD 245-300k), long-term ownership now sits at around AED 750k-3.6m (approx. 200k – 1m p.a.). For the strongest candidates, this component has now become as consequential as the base salary itself and is increasingly the deciding factor.
Across the data set, the average target cash compensation for senior leaders has risen by around 60% from 2021 to 2025 from approximately AED 750k p.a. (approx. USD 200k p.a.) toward AED 1.1–1.2m p.a. (approx. USD 300–320k p.a.). This sustained shift reflects both the growing scale of the roles and competition for the right candidates.
Allowances related to schooling, housing, transport and flights are becoming more common across packages at both levels — around AED 170k p.a. (approx. USD 47k p.a.) at the director and VP level and AED 180k p.a. (approx. USD 49k p.a.) at the C-suite level. For candidates relocating with families, such arrangements often make the move feel permanent rather than provisional.
As VC-backed organizations operate in a fundamentally different environment from multinationals, they require a particular kind of leader who can move fast, build from scratch, and deliver without the structures that larger companies provide. The market has started pricing the scarcity of such leaders accordingly.
A well-structured long-term stake is one signal of that readiness, but it works together with clarity of role, the experience of the founding team, and the credibility of the growth story. VC-backed founders who get these elements right consistently attract these Builder Leaders.
The next wave of maturity
While these shifts are real and gathering pace, understanding and implementation remains uneven. Many founders and companies across the region are still in an earlier stage of thinking when it comes to structuring leadership packages, particularly on the long-term ownership side. The ambition to hire globally is clear with candidates from the US, UK, Singapore, Germany and France are all in scope. However, the willingness to match long-term ownership has not always kept up with that global ambition.
Part of this comes down to how equity has historically been structured in the region. Founders have typically offered a fixed monetary value in shares rather than a percentage stake that grows in value along with the company. For many senior executives particularly those who have been through the full arc of a company’s growth before the percentage model is what they are used to. For example, a CFO or CTO brought in specifically to take a company through an IPO will often have done it before, and the terms they have come to expect reflect that track record. Founders who want to attract this caliber of leadership need to understand the model these executives are coming from before entering the conversation.
Another gap we are seeing is in linking compensation to performance in a more deliberate way. Some of the world’s most successful scale-ups have built incentive models that reward the right behaviors alongside financial outcomes. Revolut is a notable example: the company introduced an internal system called Karma, which tracks employee behavior against key metrics and feeds directly into how people are rewarded. LinkedIn, Airbnb and Uber have each approached this differently, but the underlying principle is consistent: when the link between behavior, performance and reward is clear, it drives both results and retention.
Among scale-ups in the region, intentional design is still relatively rare. In an environment where leadership is mobile and the draw of larger markets is constant, clarity around roles, growth, and decision-making becomes a powerful lever for founders looking to retain the leaders they’ve fought to hire.
The opportunity ahead
Having supported leadership hiring in the venture capital and private equity sectors across MENA for the past eight years, we have seen a clear maturation among leaders and boards in their approach to executive compensation. Packages have moved in line with inflation and competition for talent, and benefits are converging with global public and private market norms.
The region now has the capital, ambition, infrastructure, and regulatory foundations to build companies of lasting scale. Whether it does so will depend less on market conditions than on leadership choices. Compensation is only one signal, but it is a telling one: as expectations rise, founders who approach leadership with the same rigor they apply to growth, capital, and risk will be best positioned to build companies that endure.
