OORI, a Riyadh-based investment platform focused on private markets, has received a licence from Saudi Arabia’s Capital Market Authority (CMA) to conduct Arranging and Advising activities, the company announced on 10 August 2026. The licence, numbered 26341-30, clears OORI to operate as a regulated private markets platform for qualified investors and to begin preparing for operations.
What the licence actually covers
Arranging and Advising is an established regulated activity category under the , distinct from dealing, managing or custody activities, each of which carries its own separate licensing requirements and minimum capital thresholds. OORI’s platform will offer Shariah-compliant investment structures to qualified investors in the Kingdom, with regulated access to curated private market opportunities.
The company said its initial focus is technology companies spanning pre-seed, venture, growth and pre-IPO stages, with plans to expand into other alternative asset classes over time. To support that offering, OORI has built a network of partnerships spanning investment banks, venture capital firms, private equity funds, wealth managers, family offices and independent financial advisors.
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The funding behind the licence
OORI completed a seven-figure US dollar pre-seed round in 2024, backed by strategic investors, family offices and angel investors across Saudi Arabia, the GCC and Europe. Named backers include , an ADGM-regulated venture capital firm founded in 2022 that invests across the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, and , a Riyadh-based family office founded in 2008 that typically backs education, healthcare and information technology businesses.
The company said that funding covered the development of its technology platform, the regulatory licensing process itself, and its operational launch, a two-year gap between raising the round and actually clearing the CMA’s licensing bar.
Elie Nasr, OORI’s co-founder and chief executive, said private markets have “historically been accessible to only a small segment of high-net-worth investors, largely because of structural and cost barriers rather than a lack of demand.”
Naif Al Ajmi, the company’s co-founder, said pursuing a CMA licence “from day one reflects our confidence in the Kingdom’s long-term vision.”
A regulated platform today, a more ambitious roadmap later
OORI’s own company description goes beyond the licence it holds. Beyond Arranging and Advising, the company describes a long-term vision that includes tokenisation, smart contracts and “more efficient digital investment rails built on its own Layer 1 chain on Avalanche.” None of that is covered by the licence announced this week, which applies specifically to arranging and advising activity, not to issuing or trading tokenised securities.
The distance between what’s regulated today and what the company describes as its future direction is worth keeping separate, rather than reading the announcement as covering both.
OORI’s licensing lands inside a to widen access to Saudi capital markets: the regulator abolished Qualified Foreign Investor status and opened the Main Market to all categories of foreign investors from 1 February 2026. That reform applies to listed securities on Tadawul, a different market segment to OORI’s private markets focus, but it reflects the same regulatory direction, a CMA actively expanding who can participate in Saudi capital markets, across both public and private segments, this year.
