The studio
We are not an investor that helps. We are a co-founder that stays.
Eleven companies, formed from a Saudi clinical need and carried through to a Kingdom contract.
01 — Thesis
The Kingdom is buying health innovation faster than it is building it.
Saudi Arabia is running the largest healthcare transformation on earth. Hospital clusters are privatizing. A national genome program is underway. The SFDA now clears devices on a timeline that competes with established regulators. The demand is real and it is funded.
The supply is not. Capital arrives ahead of companies. Foreign vendors win contracts they cannot localize. Founders with the science lack the regulatory path, and the ones with the regulatory path lack the science. The bottleneck is not money. It is company formation.
So we form them. KaRama sits where the science, the regulator, and the buyer are all within driving distance of one another, and we assemble the company in between.
Why a studio and not a fund
A fund selects. A studio builds. In a market where the supply of investable companies is the constraint, selection is the wrong instrument — there is not enough to select from. We take a founder's stake because we do founder's work: the entity, the first hires, the regulatory file, the first customer conversation.
What we will not do
We do not take a technology looking for a market and point it at the Kingdom. We do not run a cohort, a demo day, or a program with an end date. We do not put a Saudi wrapper on a foreign company and call it localization.
How we build
Four stages. We stay through all of them.
STAGE 01
Originate
We start from an unmet need inside a Saudi health system, not from a deck in an inbox. Clinical partner first, thesis second.
- · Cluster and MoH problem interviews
- · Regional epidemiology review
- · Reimbursement and procurement test
STAGE 02
Incorporate
We co-found. Entity, cap table, first hires, first capital off our own balance sheet. Founders own the company; we own a founder's stake.
- · Kingdom entity and cap table
- · First capital from our balance sheet
- · Founding team recruitment
STAGE 03
Localize
SFDA pathway, data residency, Saudization, Ministry of Health procurement readiness. The stage that kills imported startups is the one we are built for.
- · SFDA pre-submission and pathway
- · Data residency architecture
- · Saudization and vendor registration
STAGE 04
Scale
First paying cluster, then the Gulf, then the syndicate. We open the round to outside capital once the contract is signed.
- · First contracted cluster
- · GCC expansion
- · Series A opened to co-investors
03 — The campus
Resident on the SFDA campus in Hittin.
Our office is on the Saudi Food and Drug Authority's campus in the Middle Sector at Hittin, Riyadh. That is not an address detail. It is the reason the studio works.
Regulatory strategy fails when it starts late. A device design freezes, a data architecture sets, a clinical protocol locks — and only then does someone read the guidance. By that point every fix is expensive and some are impossible. Being resident means the pre-submission conversation happens in the first month, in person, while the design is still soft.