For more than a decade, VAP Group's business model rested on a simple premise: bring the world's builders into one room and let the conversations do the rest. The company built the Global AI Show and the Global Blockchain Show into fixtures of the Gulf's technology calendar, gatherings where founders pitched investors, governments courted innovators, and thousands of attendees compared notes on where artificial intelligence and blockchain were heading next. Now the convener wants to be a participant.

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At the Global AI Show, Global Games Show and Global Blockchain Show in Riyadh, held June 29 and 30, 2026, VAP Group announced the launch of VAP Ventures, a dedicated investment arm that plans to back 100 startups by 2030 across artificial intelligence, Web3 and blockchain, and digital games. The announcement was one of the flagship moments of this year's Riyadh editions, where thousands of global industry leaders, innovators and decision makers gathered to explore the technologies expected to define the next decade.

Why an Events Company Is Becoming an Investor

The logic behind the move is less surprising than it first sounds. VAP Group has spent years sitting closer to early stage founders than almost any traditional venture firm, watching pitches, tracking which startups draw a crowd, and learning which ideas keep resurfacing across AI, blockchain and gaming circuits from Dubai to Riyadh. That vantage point has effectively functioned as an informal deal pipeline for years. VAP Ventures formalizes it. Rather than starting a fund from scratch and hoping to build founder access over time, the company is converting an asset it already has, proximity to thousands of builders through its event platforms, into an investment thesis. It is a model closer to how some media and platform companies have approached venture investing elsewhere in the world, betting that distribution and relationships can be just as valuable as capital alone.

More Than a Check

What sets VAP Ventures apart from a conventional early stage fund is less the size of its ambition than the shape of its support. Each startup selected for the program will receive direct capital, but also access to VAP Group's media ecosystem, marketing capabilities, talent network and its globally recognized event platforms. That is a deliberate departure from a purely transactional funding relationship. Many early stage founders, particularly outside of established venture hubs, struggle less with finding an initial check and more with the unglamorous work that follows it: building credibility, reaching the right customers, hiring specialized talent, and getting in front of the investors who write the next, larger round. By bundling capital with visibility and operational support, VAP Ventures is betting that the gap between a good idea and a scalable company is often a resourcing problem as much as a funding one.

It is also a bet on sequencing. Instead of asking founders to first win a fundraising pitch and then separately chase press coverage, customer introductions and hiring pipelines, VAP Ventures is folding those functions into the investment itself. For a startup building enterprise AI tools or a Web3 infrastructure product, a single relationship that covers a term sheet, a media placement and an introduction to a talent pool can meaningfully shorten the distance between a working prototype and a company with paying customers. Whether that integrated model proves more efficient than assembling the same resources piecemeal from separate investors, agencies and recruiters is the open question the next five years will answer.

A Saudi Launchpad With Global Reach

The decision to introduce VAP Ventures from Riyadh rather than Dubai, where VAP Group is headquartered, is itself a signal. Saudi Arabia has spent the past several years building sovereign backed capital infrastructure, from the Public Investment Fund to Jada Fund of Funds and Sanabil Investments, that has made the Kingdom an increasingly central node in global venture activity. VAP Ventures' focus sectors, enterprise AI, Web3 infrastructure, blockchain innovation and next generation gaming ecosystems, line up closely with the Kingdom's push toward knowledge based industries and its ambition to be a launchpad for globally competitive technology companies rather than simply a regional market for them.

For North American founders and investors watching the Gulf's venture ecosystem mature, VAP Ventures adds another entry point to a region that has become harder to ignore. Over the past year, major Western firms have begun writing their first checks into Gulf based companies, drawn by sovereign wealth backing, fast growing enterprise adoption of AI and a founder base increasingly building for international rather than purely regional markets. VAP Ventures approaches that same opportunity from the opposite direction, using a Gulf platform to reach outward toward AI, Web3 and gaming founders anywhere in the world who want a foothold in a region where capital, government support and enterprise demand are converging quickly. That two way traffic, global capital flowing into the Gulf and Gulf platforms reaching outward for global founders, is quickly becoming one of the more consequential undercurrents in international venture investing.

What Founders Get

“We gave founders a stage for years. Now we’re backing them. VAP Ventures will invest in more than 100 startups across AI, Web3, and gaming over five years in capital, media, talent, and reach, all under one roof. This is visibility turning into vital support,” said Vishal Parmar, Founder and CEO of VAP Group.

Parmar founded VAP Group in India in 2013 before relocating its operations to Dubai and expanding into event platforms across AI, blockchain and Web3. The company's evolution into venture investment tracks a broader pattern seen across the Gulf's innovation economy in 2026: platforms that once measured success purely by attendance and sponsorship are increasingly measuring it by the startups that graduate from their ecosystems into durable, funded companies.

The Test That Comes Next

The ambition is significant. Backing 100 startups by 2030 across three fast moving sectors will require VAP Ventures to build genuine investment discipline alongside its existing strengths in media and marketing, a different skill set from running a conference floor. Startups interested in applying will be able to submit company information and pitch materials through a dedicated application platform as VAP Ventures begins building its inaugural cohort, and the coming twelve to eighteen months will show whether the blended model translates into the kind of outcomes that justify the pivot. What is already clear is the direction of travel. Across AI, Web3 and gaming, the platforms that once simply hosted the industry's conversations are increasingly deciding to fund where those conversations lead, and VAP Ventures is one of the clearest examples yet of that shift moving from the Gulf's stages onto its cap tables.

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