Nuwa Capital is a GCC-based venture capital firm known for backing entrepreneurs across the full lifecycle of their companies. Founded in 2020 and headquartered in Dubai, the firm has made over 50 investments across the region in early-stage deals, venture debt, and a dedicated growth-stage co-investment program.

Nuwa utilizes co-investment vehicles to double down on its winners and give LPs direct access to growth-stage opportunities. As that strategy matured, the firm needed infrastructure capable of executing those deals at the pace, structure, and investor-experience standard the region’s growth-stage market demands.

The Challenge

Fragmented co-investments were limiting Nuwa’s ability to scale its growth-stage strategy.

Co-investment vehicles are essential to Nuwa’s thesis. As portfolio companies mature and reach growth-stage milestones, Nuwa needs the ability to double down on its winners by quickly and efficiently bringing existing LPs and new co-investors into structured vehicles.

Before Zest, that process was entirely ad hoc and spread across different channels and service providers. The approach worked at a small scale, but it couldn't support Nuwa's ambition to run a structured growth-stage program across multiple deals per year in the region.

In order to run a simple co-investment vehicle, firms like Nuwa must be responsible for a number of time-consuming, administrative tasks:

1. Set up the vehicle: Engage an administrator, pay annual administrator fees, submit incorporation docs, and wait for regulator review.
2. Open a dedicated bank account in the name of the SPV: The vehicle’s bank account that accepts investor funds must be separate from the firm’s bank account.   
3. KYC investors across jurisdictions, each with different documents: Document requirements vary across jurisdictions; residents in the UAE may need a utility bill, while Saudi residents need to present a national address document. 
4. Authenticate physical documents: Without a digital platform, an ID must be certified by a lawyer, in-house counsel, or a notary public, which costs money and takes days.
5. Manage investor communications across fragmented channels: Updates, reporting, and deal communications flow through email threads and PDF attachments stored across personal inboxes and shared drives.
6. KYC renewals: Investors must be re-KYC'd throughout the life of the vehicle, adding ongoing costs and responsibilities for a GP. 
7. Ongoing registrar maintenance: The registrar of members must be kept up to date with the regulator at all times.
8. Reporting obligations: A GP must continuously report to the relevant regulatory body throughout the vehicle's life.

These operational requirements, particularly unique to the region, meant that scaling a structured growth-stage co-investment program on top of old infrastructure was simply not viable.

"I’ve done SPVs before, ad hoc. It’s horror stories all the time. With Zest, things are very smooth and under control.” - Victor Sunyer, Partner, Nuwa Capital

As Nuwa’s fund strategy matured and the firm expanded into dedicated growth-stage co-investments, the team needed infrastructure that could keep pace: a solution that was fast, digital-first, and built for the structural complexity of late-stage deals in the GCC.

The Solution

Zest gave Nuwa the infrastructure to professionalize and scale its co-investment program.

Zest provided Nuwa Capital with an end-to-end digital platform to create, structure, and execute co-investment vehicles tailored to the firm’s evolving strategy - regardless of deal complexity, investor mix, or jurisdictional requirements. 

The partnership began with an initial proof of concept: Nuwa needed to run a co-investment vehicle that accommodated two separate tranches, with a mix of LPs and new co-investors, on a tight execution timeline. They chose Zest as their infrastructure platform to execute the deal. 

"The first deal that we did as a proof of concept was Calo. We partnered with Zest to set up the SPV. It was two tranches, we were leading, and we had to get committed very quickly. It was done very quickly and effectively - both from a timing and cost perspective.” - Victor Sunyer, Partner, Nuwa Capital

From there, Nuwa continued to use Zest for additional co-investment vehicles, each with different requirements. Across multiple deals, the platform handled varying deal and investor types and maintained tight execution timelines, demonstrating its flexibility as Nuwa's strategy evolved.

With Zest, Nuwa was able to:

• Move faster on high-conviction growth-stage opportunities, with a digital workflow that compresses the work historically done across legal, ops, and investor relations.
• Keep co-investments in one place, with all transaction documents, capital calls, and communications accessible through each investor’s dashboard.
• Anchor deals with committed capital early, helping accelerate closes that had previously stalled when commitments were tracked manually across ad hoc SPVs.
• Onboard institutional investors digitally, giving regional LPs a streamlined onboarding journey and a single account to access documentation, monitor investments, and stay informed.
• Build flexibility into deal structures, with the ability to layer in additional co-investors and tranches as new opportunities emerge within a vehicle.

But Zest offered more than a digital platform. Nuwa found a true operational partner - one that took the time to understand the specific processes that Nuwa's co-investors and LPs required, and adapted alongside the firm as those requirements evolved.

“Zest has grown alongside our growth. The platform really helps because you can go to market much faster, have everything in one place, and execute the investment, the commitments, and the escrows. They understand our processes and adapt to them as we go along.” - Victor Sunyer, Partner, Nuwa Capital

An Improved LP and Co-Investor Experience

For Nuwa, this has emerged as one of the most important elements of the partnership. In a region where LP relationships are built on trust, the quality of the co-investor experience is a competitive advantage in itself.

Through Zest, Nuwa offers its co-investors and LPs:

• Centralized dashboards where each investor can view their full set of co-investments, documentation, and reporting in one place.
• Cleaner governance, with structured workflows for capital calls, distributions, and vehicle-level decisions.
• Built-in consent and voting mechanisms, giving co-investors a clear, auditable role in vehicle-level decisions rather than relying on email chains.
• Transparency and reporting, so investors can monitor their positions and access updates on their own terms.
• A professionalized investor experience, consistent across vehicles, that signals the same operational maturity LPs expect from established institutional managers.

“We always tell our investors: it’s better for you to be in Zest than outside of Zest, because the governance model is more geared towards investor consent and voting. For them, it’s a better deal.” - Victor Sunyer, Partner, Nuwa Capital

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The Impact

A scalable co-investment engine that powers Nuwa’s growth-stage strategy.

Zest has enabled Nuwa to transform its co-investment approach from ad hoc, one-off deals into a structured, repeatable program that supports the firm’s ambition to deploy capital into growth-stage opportunities across the GCC.

‍Faster execution across deal types: Zest digitized the entire co-investment workflow, replacing manual legal and administrative work with a streamlined digital process across a range of deal types and structures.

‍Reduced administrative load on a lean team: Workflows that previously consumed meaningful partner and operations time — onboarding, document distribution, consent collection, capital calls, reporting — are now handled through the platform. The result is more capacity directed toward sourcing, diligence, and portfolio support.

‍A better experience for LPs: Zest's investor-friendly governance model with built-in consent and voting mechanisms, online documentation, and a single platform for monitoring co-investments has become a selling point when bringing LPs into vehicles.

‍Scalable infrastructure for a growing strategy: Nuwa now has a trusted, repeatable process for co-investment vehicles, enabling the firm to provide its LPs with access to high-demand, growth-stage deals while keeping its lean operational model intact.

“We have investors and LPs that think of us as a source of access to deals they otherwise would not get on their own. We give them access because they are investors with us.” - Victor Sunyer, Partner, Nuwa Capital

Zest’s infrastructure enables Nuwa to meet that demand without the operational overhead that once made co-investments a bottleneck.

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Insights from Victor Sunyer, Partner at Nuwa Capital

Reflecting on his own experience building Nuwa’s operations, Victor offered advice for aspiring fund managers navigating the operational complexities of running a GP.

‍“Keep it simple and keep it under control. You need to really do things by yourself first and understand the pains before you can make things automatic or tech-driven. Especially when you’re managing third-party capital - you have to have a very detailed duty of care towards that capital and everything behind it.” - Victor Sunyer, Partner, Nuwa Capital

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‍Want to see how Zest can support your co-investment programme? Speak to our team.