Elissa Freiha:The Angel Investor

The Angel Investor Elissa is credited for finding an investment platform that is Dubai-based. It is known as Womena. She is a descendant of a Lebanese and an American, but was born and brought up in Paris. So she has done her graduation from the American University of Paris. She holds a BA in Global Communications degree and what is a lesser known fact about her is that she can speak a total of 4 languages. She stands on the pedestal with around 30 investments that extend between MENA and North America. No wonder the media outlets frequently list her in the list of most influential and powerful women. Her name appeared in the Arabian Business magazine's 100 most powerful Arab women 2015 and 2016 list. She also holds a position in the 100 most influential Arabs under the age of 40. Inspiring indeed, she is the investor and angel herself, Elissa Freiha

What are you doing and how did it lead you to where you are today? What was your secret to success?

Entrepreneurship was something that I always was expecting to get involved in; I always knew that I wanted to start my own company. I wasn’t always sure what it was going to be, but my mind and heart were open to any opportunity that would come across and inspire me. Coming out of University, I was eager to move to the UAE, I couldn’t think of a better market to launch a business at the time. The USA, at that time, was too competitive for me and Europe was too traditional and not open to innovation of any kind. So, I thought the UAE was the next frontier. So, I moved to the UAE with two of my friends and launched two businesses.

One was an F&B Business, a restaurant and concept store, and another one was, what is now Womena – an Angel Investor Network, hoping to help MENA-based angel investors invest in MENA-based tech companies. As I worked on both of those projects simultaneously, I realized that one kept on sucking the energy out of me and was quite exhausting – that was the restaurant, we kept hitting lots of barriers and brick walls. The other was very inspiring, an endless source of energy! For me, everything seemed to fall right into place and fit, quite naturally, that was the Angel Investor Network. So, as the months progressed, I ended up dropping my efforts towards the restaurant. As an investor can see, any entrepreneur needs to be 100% on their projects. Then, my co-founder and I decided to focus 100% of our efforts on Womena and after a year of being in the UAE and doing our Market Research, we were able to launch our brand ‘Womena’ on November 1st, 2014. We started hosting Monthly Pitch Events where a pre-sourced, pre-vetted set of entrepreneurs pitch their business ideas to our network of investors.

Since then we have successfully invested in seven portfolio companies, and followed on, in three of them, as well as investing a total of about 700,000 dollars through our platform. We have forty female angels and we’re now looking at expanding Womena into being more than just an investment network, as well as the voice of female entrepreneurship in the Middle East.