INVESTOR DIRECTORY
An investor database built for MENA, inside your CRM
Ishara ships with 32,822 investors behind five doors: Investors, Companies, Firms, Lists, and Ecosystem. Cheque-size containment filtering answers the question you actually ask, profiles carry provenance labels on every value, and any filtered view is a URL you can share. The market is preloaded; you bring the deals.
Five doors
One corpus, five ways in.
An investor database is only useful if you can enter it from the question you actually have. Ishara gives the same corpus five doors, each a filterable plane, and every filtered view is a URL you can send to a co-founder.
Investors
32,822 people who write cheques, filterable by cheque size, stage, sector, and location, each with a deep profile behind the card.
Companies
The companies investors have backed, as a browsable plane of their own. Start from a company you admire and drill down to its backers.
Firms
Funds and firms as first-class records: the team behind the brand, declared cheque ranges, and the portfolio in one dossier.
Lists
Ranked lists in the Top-100 style, kept as data instead of articles. A list seat shows up on the investor profile it belongs to.
Ecosystem
1,793 Saudi ecosystem organisations, bilingual in Arabic and English: the support structure around the region's deal-making, mapped.
Find my investors
The sixth door is a question: describe your raise and get a ranked shortlist with the reason each investor is on it.
How matching works →Cheque-size containment, not cheque-size overlap
Most databases treat cheque size as a range-overlap query, so a fund that claims anything from $25k to $25M matches every search and tells you nothing. Ishara filters by containment: name the cheque you are raising in, and the directory keeps an investor only when that number sits inside their declared range.
Worked example: a $500k cheque
You are assembling a $3M seed round from cheques of roughly $500k. Filter the directory for a $500k cheque and containment keeps the investor whose declared range is $250k to $1M, and drops the claim-everything fund whose range is $25k to $25M, even though both would survive a naive overlap test. Stack the stage, sector, and location filters on top, and the result is a page of plausible cheque-writers instead of a page of maybes. The filtered view is a URL, so the shortlist you built is the shortlist your co-founder sees.
Deep profiles
A profile that reads like a dossier, labelled like evidence.
Each investor profile carries an investment thesis, a track record broken down by round, career history, press mentions, peers, and any ranked-list seats. Every stored value is provenance-labelled, and self-declared claims never share a column with verified facts, so you always know whether you are reading what an investor says about themselves or what the record shows.
- Track record by round, so you see where an investor actually plays
- Truncated counts display as 50+, never as a guessed number
- 34,097 photos downloaded and self-hosted, so profiles do not rot when a source link dies
Firms
The firm behind the person, in one dossier.
Investors move; firms persist. The firm profile pulls the team, declared cheque ranges, and the portfolio into one screen, so when a matching result points at a partner you can immediately see who else sits at the table and what the firm as a whole has backed.
- Team roster linking back to each individual investor profile
- Cheque ranges at the firm level, feeding the same containment filter
- Portfolio companies one click from the firm record
Companies and backers
Start from a company. End at its backers.
The companies plane turns the corpus inside out: browse the companies investors have funded, open one, and drill down to the investors behind it. It is the fastest honest answer to the question every founder asks, who funds companies like mine. Behind the scenes, a company directory of roughly 743,000 brands backs enrichment, so records arrive with identity attached instead of as bare names.
- Backers drill-down from any company to the investors behind it
- Filterable like every other plane, and every filtered view is a shareable URL
- Enrichment backed by a ~743,000-brand company directory
Ranked lists
Top-100 lists as data, not press releases.
Ranked lists live in the directory as structured planes: ordered, filterable, and linked in both directions. An investor's list seats appear on their profile, and a list opens as a plane you can work through instead of an article you scroll past. When a list matters in your market, it is queryable here.
- Ordered entries linked to full investor and firm profiles
- List seats surfaced on the profiles they belong to
- Work a list with the same filters and shareable URLs as every plane
The MENA gap, stated plainly
Here is the number most investor databases hide: of the 32,822 investors in this directory today, only 175 are located in MENA. Global databases barely see this region, and repackaging one would have reproduced its blind spot. So we publish the gap and we are closing it: an enrichment pass built around LEAP 2026 is adding 272 investment entities and 572 investor people from the region. That work is in progress, not done, and every value lands provenance-labelled like the rest of the corpus.
Honesty policy: self-declared claims never share a column with verified facts, truncation shows as 50+ rather than a guess, and copy on this site never presents in-progress enrichment as finished. The corpus is compiled from public sources and self-declared profiles; we label it, we do not launder it.
Why the gap exists, and what it costs founders raising here, is the subject of the MENA investor gap.
Why an investor database belongs inside the CRM
A standalone investor database ends at a browser tab: you find a name, then retype it into whatever tracks your raise. In Ishara the directory and the CRM share one object kernel, so the distance from found to funnel is one click. Add-to-CRM is idempotent, adding the same investor twice never creates a duplicate, and multi-select pushes a whole filtered page into a staged raise pipeline at once.
The same closeness powers what the directory alone cannot do: investor matching ranks the corpus against your described raise and mines warm intro paths from your own workspace, and the object CRM underneath means an investor record takes fields, views, and email like any other record in your book.
The fastest way to judge an investor database for MENA is to open it on your own market. Start free, filter for your sector and cheque, and count the names you did not know.
Frequently asked questions
How big is the Ishara investor database?
32,822 investors on day one, reachable through five doors: an investors plane, a companies plane with backers drill-down, firm dossiers, ranked lists kept as data, and 1,793 bilingual Saudi ecosystem organisations. 34,097 investor photos are downloaded and self-hosted so profiles do not rot when source links die.
How much MENA coverage does it honestly have?
Today, 175 of the 32,822 investors are located in MENA. That gap is real and we publish it. An enrichment pass built around LEAP 2026 is adding 272 investment entities and 572 investor people from the region; it is in progress, not finished, and every value lands provenance-labelled.
What is cheque-size containment filtering?
You name the cheque you are raising in, and the filter keeps an investor only when that number sits inside their declared cheque range. A naive overlap filter would also return funds whose enormous claimed ranges merely brush yours; containment drops them, so the result is a page of plausible cheque-writers.
Where does the investor data come from, and can I trust it?
The corpus is compiled from public sources and self-declared profiles, and it is labelled rather than laundered: every stored value carries its provenance, self-declared claims never share a column with verified facts, and truncated counts display as 50+ instead of a guessed number.
Stop working the market blind.
The investors, the tenders, and the signals are in Ishara from day one. You bring the deals.
Free to start · 32,822 investors on day one · Qatar tenders live, more markets on the way