CapQuest raises $1 million in Dubai to automate ownership tables and employee stock plans

When a startup in Dubai or Riyadh moves from a limited founding stage to its first official pricing round and allocation of shares to employees, the scattered ownership tables in manual files quickly become an operational and legal burden that hampers due diligence. In this operational space specifically, the fintech company CapQuest, based in Dubai, closed a pre-seed financing round of one million dollars, jointly led by Oraseya Capital and the AMKM Family Office, to accelerate product development, deepen automation, and expand commercially into international markets.

The company was founded in 2023 by three entrepreneurs with prior founding experience: Antoine Bruna, who serves as chief executive officer, Marco Banfi, and Anfita Farshani. The platform operates legally under CapQuest Software Limited, registered in the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) under registration number 9388. In addition to its headquarters in the Innovation Hub of the DIFC, our review of the company’s official documents on its website (capquest.io) showed a second operational presence in the Station F business incubator in Paris, France. This dual positioning between the Gulf and Europe explains the company’s early-stage service to firms in eleven countries across the Middle East, Europe, and emerging markets, with notable clients including the UAE digital mortgage platform Holo, the Saudi corporate alternative-finance platform Erad, Avenia, and the European trade-credit platform Teylor.

The platform replaces scattered manual tables with a live digital share ledger that manages eight international employee-ownership plan types alongside convertible-debt instruments.The platform’s technical specifications state that it consolidates cap-table management, employee-stock-ownership plans (ESOPs), fundraising tools, and investor-relations functions into a single central interface. In the employee module, the platform supports eight international ownership structures, including stock options, ordinary shares, subscription rights, restricted stock units (RSUs), restricted stock awards (RSAs), virtual shares, stock-appreciation rights (SARs), and price-threshold shares. It also automates time-based and performance-linked vesting schedules, sends automated alerts before vesting dates and exercise expirations, and governs termination procedures. In the financing module, the platform tracks simple agreement for future equity (SAFEs), including valuation caps and discount rates, calculates accrued interest on convertible bonds, monitors investment-debt repayment schedules, and offers dilution and exit scenario modeling in multiple currencies under the requirements of various jurisdictions.

Oraseya Capital’s participation in leading this round reveals a trend of government-backed capital in the Gulf moving toward financing the legal and operational infrastructure of the startup ecosystem.The investment comes days after the Dubai Integrated Economic Zones Authority (DIEZ) announced that it is doubling the size of the venture-capital fund managed by its investment arm Oraseya Capital, from 500 million dirhams (US 136.2 million) to one billion dirhams (US 272.3 million), as part of the Dubai Economic Agenda (D33) targets, raising the investment cap per company from US 3 million to US 6 million and extending it beyond the B-category through a portfolio of 66 active companies. The early bet on a governance-tool reflects a foundational belief that regional company growth and the attraction of international funds in later-stage rounds require instantly auditable ownership records and disciplined employee-stock-plan structures, alongside consumer-product interfaces.

However, a review of the platform’s contractual terms and privacy policy presents founders and legal and financial managers in the Gulf, Egypt, and the Levant with three practical constraints before migrating their shareholder records.First, the company uses a model that combines a limited free tier with paid subscriptions and a data-migration assistance service, but the terms of service set a 60-business-day window to complete migration followed by a strict 20-calendar-day audit period; if those twenty days pass without written objection, the migrated ownership data are deemed contractually correct and the client alone bears legal responsibility for any error in the underlying records, while the platform’s financial liability is capped at the total subscription fees paid over twelve months or US 100 for the free tier. Second, regarding data sovereignty and compliance, although the company is overseen by a data-protection officer in the DIFC and provides data-processing agreements that comply with the European GDPR, the privacy policy explicitly states that customer data and legal documents are stored in a cloud data centre in the United States. Third, the company does not publicly disclose the pricing tiers of its paid packages or its revenue size. Consequently, the practical decision for a founder or finance director in the region when automating their ownership table requires prior verification that the external hosting complies with the shareholder-document retention rules in their jurisdiction, and a review of every vesting and dilution equation within the contractual twenty-day window before finalising the record for investors.