Still starting up
November 6, 2017
Over the past four or five years, it has been conceived, announced, born, developed, mapped, hyped, challenged, expanded, reassessed, praised, mapped again, hyped to excess, and questioned. But all the talk makes it hard to assess the true state of Lebanon’s tech entrepreneurship ecosystem in 2017.
Finance in form of the funds mobilized under Circular 331, an initiative by Banque Du Liban (BDL), Lebanon’s central bank, to invest in startups has been the driving force behind transforming a loose collection of tech entrepreneurs into a budding ecosystem, and fund managers say that ecosystem is quietly thriving. Established funds see their portfolios developing nicely, and do not anticipate the pipeline of interesting startups to run dry any time soon, pointing as an example to recent demo days at Smart ESA, an accelerator that was launched in 2016. Flat6Labs and Azure, two new venture capital funds, have experienced more interest than they had