Merced

Omar Al-Midani, the firm's founder and CEO, chairs the investment committee and leads the investment team from Riyadh. The committee includes representation from the anchor family offices that provide Merced's capital base, reflecting the firm's hybrid structure between a family-office platform and an institutional asset manager. Al-Midani's background spans institutional investing within Gulf sovereign and family structures prior to launching Merced in 2005.

Merced sources investments through its network of Gulf family-office relationships, many of which span multiple decades. The firm also leverages co-investment relationships with the Saudi Public Investment Fund and Abu Dhabi's Mubadala, which provide visibility into large regional transactions. Additionally, Merced accesses global technology deal flow via fund commitments to venture managers in Silicon Valley, Europe and Asia, creating a pipeline for direct co-investment opportunities alongside those managers.

Merced operates as a multi-family-office platform that functions like a specialized growth-stage venture investor. Unlike a dedicated single-family office, it aggregates capital from several Gulf-based families alongside institutional limited partners. Unlike a conventional venture firm, its governance embeds family principals within investment oversight, giving it a hybrid posture that blends professional fund management with the time-horizon patience of family capital.

Merced engages in both fund commitments and direct investments. The firm allocates to external venture capital and growth-equity funds globally, which in turn generate co-investment rights that Merced often exercises for direct positions. This dual approach — primary fund commitments that unlock co-investment deal flow — mirrors a strategy used by several large North American family offices seeking technology exposure.

Merced has historically avoided sectors that are heavily correlated with oil prices and regional real estate cycles — the very exposures its family-office partners already hold in abundance elsewhere. The firm also tends to avoid pre-revenue deep science or biotech investments where the underwriting timeline exceeds the risk appetite of its Gulf limited-partner base, preferring software and asset-light technology models.

Merced is an independent private firm and is not owned by the Public Investment Fund. However, Merced has co-invested alongside PIF in multiple regional transactions, and the sovereign fund's growth into a global technology allocator has expanded the ecosystem in which Merced operates. The relationship is collaborative rather than structural — Merced sources deals independently and invests its own capital alongside PIF and other sovereign entities when opportunities align.

Merced's capital base is anchored by Gulf-based family offices whose wealth was primarily generated through diversified industrial, energy, real estate and trading conglomerates across Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The firm does not publicly disclose the identities of its principal family limited partners, consistent with the confidentiality norms of Gulf private wealth.