Economy of Scale: SMEs & Startups (Sponsored Content)

Jacob Greaves (0:00)

Because you're listening to this Bloomberg podcast, we thought you'd be interested in a sponsored podcast called Economy of Scale. Produced by Bloomberg Media Studios and the Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism, it delves into the changing dynamics of business growth from innovation to capital and investment. Here's a recent episode.

Scale has become synonymous with Dubai, a metropolis shaped by constant growth. In 2025, the emirate retained its position as one of the world's leading destinations for greenfield foreign direct investment. But scale isn't just about size. Globally, it can be the difference between success and failure, whether bringing breakthrough technologies to market or building smart infrastructure that will shape the cities of tomorrow. Welcome to Economy of Scale. In this series, we'll explore one central question. What does it really take to scale?

I'm your host, Jacob Greaves, and in this episode, we'll be looking at the first stage where scale is truly tested in SMEs and startups. To discuss this and more, I'm joined here in Dubai by Sandeep Sani, CEO and co-founder of Valeo Health, a health tech provider that recently surpassed the milestone of 1 million orders, and by Raman Asan Sow, managing partner of Antler, an early stage VC fund with a global footprint of enterprising portfolio companies. Sandeep, Raman, thank you so much for joining us.

I want to start with the global outlook when it comes to SMEs and startups. 2025 saw an increase when it comes to global bench capital funding, the likes of Bain & Company reporting quarter on quarter increase for Q4 2025, around 12%. Raman, is that track of what you've been seeing in reality, and do you expect that growth trajectory to continue?

Raman Asan Sow (1:47)

Yes, we do about 400 investment every year across 27 places in the world. That gives you a decent antenna to see what's happening. I think what we see is that we deploy capital all across the regions with a few nuances. One is there is a concentration in certain region of the world.

The second is there is concentration in certain types of businesses as well. AI has been taking the lion's share, and that's something that we foresee, we believe will continue to happen.

Jacob Greaves (2:18)

And with AI taking that lion's share, Sandeep, is that a challenge facing new startups, especially those who aren't operating necessarily directly in the AI universe?

Sandeep Sani (2:27)

So I think more than a challenge, I think it's an opportunity for the startups or for the SMEs, especially pre-2024. You need to incorporate AI, maybe even start thinking or rethinking and becoming an AI first company. The most similar situation of like this happened to me in 2013 when we were building Lazada in Southeast Asia, and 3G came into being and we were all like, we need to become mobile first because 95 percent of our customers were accessing a website from mobile phone. So all of a sudden, you had this big creative team that was designing a desktop on a daily basis and changing it. Became redundant when all people cared about was how to squeeze everything on a smaller screen. So you really had to rethink from scratch what experience people should have on the mobile. And I think now is the same thing. We need to rethink how an AI first company would be building something similar to what we've been building for the past five years.

And it's very exciting.

Jacob Greaves (3:22)

And Romain, how do you approach this? Because there's so much noise and money surrounding AI at the moment. So how, from a VC perspective, do you find the next big thing, the next talent?

Raman Asan Sow (3:32)

I think one of the biggest shift is the level of expectation. And back in the last other days versus today, the speed to scale is insanely different. As of today, I think the last stat was 20% of the Unicorne post 2023 hit 1 billion in less than two years. It used to be 5% before. So the speed to scale is extremely different. So many people now are trying something. So the level one of I'm AI native claimed is extremely high. The ability to go much deeper is not. So a very simple way for us to check how good is what you built, is just by understanding what actually do you build.

The second is in a world where everyone can try, usually no one have the depth of understanding the customers. And it's super easy to build a deck on cloud or on Gemini.

It's not easy to speak to 100 people and try to really go deep on what's the level of insight that I can extract, that will tell me how I should direct my business.