End-to-end build of an AI-powered deal-making, software distribution and Forward Deployed Engineering business for a key GCC family office

The mandate

A principal-owner family office in the GCC — with holdings spanning real estate, industrials, financial services and early-stage technology — asked us to design and stand up, from a blank sheet, a new operating platform combining three complementary businesses under a single P&L: (1) an AI-augmented deal-making desk sourcing, screening and executing minority growth and buy-and-build opportunities across MENA, Europe and the US; (2) a software distribution arm reselling and co-selling a curated portfolio of AI, data and cyber ISVs into GCC enterprise and government accounts; and (3) a Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) practice embedding senior engineers inside strategic customers to industrialize AI use cases end-to-end. The three businesses were designed to compound: FDE creates trusted access to CIO and CDO offices; distribution monetizes that access at scale; the deal desk converts privileged operating insight into proprietary transactions.

Go-to-market

We defined the ideal-customer profile by segment — sovereign, banking, energy, healthcare and large family conglomerates — and built the account-tiering and named-account plan for the top 120 logos across KSA, UAE and Qatar, with a dedicated pursuit plan per tier-1 account. The ISV partner portfolio was structured with tiered economics (referral, resale, co-sell, OEM) and clear rules of engagement per partner, avoiding channel conflict inside a small market. The deal-origination engine combined three motions: proprietary AI screening of 40k+ public and private company signals per week against a codified investment thesis; a curated banker, operator and family-office network with a formal referral compensation model; and a repeatable thesis-driven outbound motion run out of the platform team. Positioning, messaging house, sales collateral and the first wave of thought-leadership were produced in-house.

“We ran the setup as an owner-operator PMO, not as advisors passing a deck to a client team. Our name is on the P&L, not just on the plan.”

Organization

We designed the target organization end-to-end: Managing Partner, Deal Partners, Head of Distribution, Head of FDE, Chief of Staff, plus a shared platform team covering finance, legal, compliance, marketing and RevOps. Every job description was written, compensation bands benchmarked against global tier-1 firms, and a partnership and carry structure defined to align long-term interests between the family office and the operating team. We ran the executive search for the first 22 hires ourselves — long-list, short-list, interviews, references and offer negotiation — and set the governance model with the family office Investment Committee, including decision rights, escalation paths and reporting cadence.

Financial planning

A fully integrated 5-year P&L, cash-flow and balance-sheet model was built with three scenarios (base, upside, downside), driven by unit economics per business line: deal fees plus carry for the desk, distribution gross margin, rebates and MDF for the ISV arm, utilization and blended bill rates for FDE. We built the capital-call schedule tying investment tranches to milestone-based unlocks, tax-efficient legal structuring across ADGM/DIFC and offshore vehicles, a transfer-pricing policy across entities, and a value-creation plan targeting a defined IRR to the family office at year 5. The model became the single source of truth for board reporting.

End-to-end execution

We ran the setup as an owner-operator PMO — not advisors passing a deck to a client team. We incorporated the entities, negotiated the anchor ISV agreements ourselves, closed the first three proprietary deals, delivered the first two FDE engagements to prove the model, deployed the CRM, virtual data room and deal-flow stack, stood up the compliance and KYC/AML function, and hired and onboarded the leadership team. Weekly operating reviews, monthly Investment Committee packs and a quarterly board pack were established from month one.

Results at month 12

Qualified pipeline above USD 400M in deal value, three closed transactions, signed distribution agreements with a curated set of category-leading ISVs, two flagship FDE engagements live with anchor GCC clients, a fully staffed leadership bench, and a governance and reporting cadence adopted by the family office as the template for its other operating platforms.