MSA Capital

Founder and Managing Partner Jenny Zeng oversees all China investments. The healthcare team is led by Partner James Feng, while Partner Hanae Kawada focuses on enterprise-facing core technology. Walid, a Partner and COO of Emerging Technology Markets, leads the firm’s Middle East and Africa practice. Each partner has autonomous coverage with central coordination from Beijing, per the firm’s website.

MSA’s MEA practice is led by Walid, a former Partner at Wamda Capital and Investment Manager at MENA Venture Investments. His track record includes originating or managing investments in Careem (acquired by Uber), Souq (acquired by Amazon), and Yemeksepeti (acquired by Delivery Hero). That on-the-ground operator network provides proprietary access to regional entrepreneurs, a sourcing channel most China-headquartered venture firms do not hold directly.

MSA covers the full venture lifecycle: seed, start-up, expansion, and late-stage growth. The firm also operates MSA Spark, a program designed to co-create companies from concept alongside founders, providing venture capital, management support, and human-resources infrastructure. This allows the firm to enter deals at formation and follow on through growth rounds.

MSA is structured as a global investment firm focused on private venture and growth assets. Its blend of traditional VC investing, in-house company incubation through MSA Spark, and a dedicated emerging-markets practice makes its model closer to a venture platform with operating-company creation capability than a standard limited-partner fund.

The firm’s stated focus is biotechnology and enterprise-facing core technology. In practice, its portfolio spans electric vehicles (Nio), AI-driven health data (Yidu Cloud), online recruitment (BOSS Zhipin), mobility (Mobike), and next-generation drug development (Sironax, Pyrotech). These cluster around deep-tech and life sciences positions with global scalability.

MSA is a signatory to the UN Principles for Responsible Investment and was the first Asian-headquartered private-markets firm to adopt the ILPA Diversity, Equity and Inclusion framework. The firm and its principals separately support The Nature Conservancy, the Beijing Apple Charity Foundation (focused on education, medical care, and environmental protection in Tibet), and the Heart of China Foundation.

Most peers either invest capital from the Middle East into Chinese assets or send small deal teams abroad. MSA embedded a senior Middle East partner directly into its leadership team, with a mandate to build and manage a dedicated on-the-ground portfolio. That dual-hub structure — Beijing for China deep-tech and biotech, MEA for emerging-technology markets — gives the firm a genuinely bilateral rather than export-oriented capital flow.