How Gulf Investment Is Evolving Into a Maturing Model Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum of Dubai's recently formed holding company promises to balance scale with measured impact.

Long active across Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East through a private family office, Sheikh Ahmed has reorganized his portfolio into a holding company designed to improve transparency, attract institutional partners, and apply a clearer governance framework to projects that blend commercial and public value.

The move places Inmā within a growing class of Gulf investment entities that operate at the intersection of private capital and national development strategy. Its stated mission—building long-term partnerships that promote growth and sustainability—reflects the broader pivot among regional investors toward measurable, policy-aligned outcomes rather than purely financial returns.

The company's name, derived from the Arabic root for "growth," captures this dual ambition: economic expansion coupled with continuity and resilience.

Inmā's activities are structured around four thematic pillars: public-sector modernization, private enterprise development, environmental sustainability, and community inclusion. These pillars serve as a blueprint for evaluating projects and measuring results against defined economic and social benchmarks.

While Inmā's structure is new, its underlying portfolio has evolved over nearly a decade. Projects associated with Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook's prior office include energy facilities in West Africa, collaborations with Abu Dhabi Ports in Guinea and Pakistan, and, most recently, a 50-year concession for the Karachi Port Trust aimed at modernizing logistics capacity and expanding bilateral trade routes between Pakistan and the Gulf.

Each case highlights the same formula: Gulf capital aligned with local government priorities and executed with technical partners capable of delivering on-the-ground results.

Advisors familiar with the transition say the holding company's purpose is to scale that model while embedding clearer standards of governance, reporting, and co-financing.

"It's an effort to bring institutional discipline to what has historically been relationship-based investing," said one regional finance executive familiar with the launch.

The company's technology arm, Nawa Technologies, illustrates this shift toward scalability. In collaboration with Oracle, Nawa is supporting digital infrastructure projects that help governments adopt cloud systems and AI-enabled tools without the prohibitive costs of building independent facilities. Call it "AI governance." The role digital systems can play in improving administrative efficiency, transparency, and service delivery is notably increasing, which, as a concept, aligns with a wider UAE policy emphasis on exporting digital expertise and infrastructure design as part of economic diplomacy.

Inmā's leaders have emphasized oversight as integral to credibility. The group will operate with an investment committee that will oversee measurement and validation of performance indicators where feasible. The metrics include service uptime, jobs created, income growth, and environmental outcomes—benchmarks that mirror those traditionally used by multilateral lenders and ESG-focused funds.

Analysts view this as part of the Gulf's broader movement to demonstrate the legitimacy of its impact claims amid increasing scrutiny from Western institutional investors.

"Measurement is no longer optional," said an impact-investing consultant based in London. "Gulf capital wants to compete on efficacy, not just scale, and the smart investors there who understand that governance is what makes both possible will succeed."

Inmā has not staged a public launch event. In this respect, it resembles an operating platform more than a financial brand—a reflection of Dubai's shift toward exporting its governance and development expertise alongside investment capital.

Significance for the Region

The creation of Inmā underscores a maturation in the Gulf's investment approach. The region's sovereign funds and family offices are increasingly institutionalizing their impact activities, reflecting both a strategic need for global credibility and domestic expectations for disciplined stewardship of capital.

Inmā's launch fits squarely within that narrative: a holding company that seeks to merge the pragmatism of private enterprise with the public accountability of development finance.

Its success will ultimately be judged not by its valuation or visibility but by the resilience of the systems it helps to build—ports that handle more trade, grids that deliver reliable power, and digital infrastructures that extend essential services. In a region where ambition often precedes implementation, Inmā's low-profile, metrics-driven approach offers a more tempered model of influence: one grounded in durability rather than scale.