OORI Targets Women Investors with GCC Private Markets Push
Riyadh-based OORI has agreed a partnership with women's leadership platform Playbook to deliver private-market investment education to female leaders across the Gulf, giving the young, regulated platform direct access to a ready-made pool of prospective women investors. The tie-up was announced at the Women Shaping Wealth Summit in Riyadh on 28 and 29 September 2026, where OORI acted as a Learning Partner. For finance professionals, the notable angle is distribution. A CMA-licensed private-markets platform is embedding itself in one of the region's fastest-growing cohorts of economically active women, with the aim of turning more of them into investors in an asset class long dominated by institutions and family offices.
What does the OORI and Playbook partnership involve?
The agreement will channel OORI's investment content into Playbook's membership community, combining educational material with live community sessions on how private markets function, how professional investors assess opportunities, and how alternative assets can sit within a longer-term wealth plan. The first activation was a workshop at the summit, titled "How Investors Identify the Winners Before Their Big Breakthrough," which walked participants through how investors judge private companies on growth potential, investability and likely returns. Further initiatives are planned beyond the event, including a co-hosted webinar for Playbook's members.
Playbook brings scale and a specific audience to the arrangement. The platform says it has more than 10,000 members across roughly 120 countries, and its own site currently puts the figure closer to 11,200 members in 119 countries. It reports more than 600 speaking slots and 150 workshops across the MENA region, and in 2024 it absorbed Women Spark, a women's angel-investment network, folding investor-access programming into a wider offer built around knowledge, networks and capital. The Women Shaping Wealth Summit, its Riyadh flagship, is aligned with Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 agenda and is pitched at global investors, founders and policymakers.
Why is OORI targeting women investors now?
Because the earning power has arrived faster than the investing behaviour. Saudi Arabia has recorded one of the sharpest increases in female economic participation of any major economy: the female labour-force participation rate rose from around 17% in 2016 to a record 36.3% in early 2025, according to Saudi government data, surpassing the original Vision 2030 target of 30% years ahead of schedule and prompting a revised target of 40% by 2030. The share of women in middle and senior management has climbed from 1.3% to roughly 4.8% across the same reform period.
That rise in income and seniority has not been matched by a comparable increase in investment participation, and private markets remain the hardest part of the gap to close. They carry higher entry thresholds, tighter access and thinner investor education than listed equities. OORI's proposition rests on narrowing that gap for a demographic that increasingly has capital to allocate but few established routes into venture, growth and pre-IPO deals.
How does this fit OORI's wider strategy?
OORI is an early-stage platform licensed by the Saudi Capital Market Authority (licence number 26341-30) to arrange and advise on private-market investments for qualified investors, with a focus on technology and alternative assets. For a platform at that stage, investor education doubles as customer acquisition. A partnership with an established women's network is a low-cost route to a qualified-investor pipeline that would otherwise take years and heavy marketing spend to build, and Playbook's prior work on investment access, including the Women Spark network it acquired, makes its membership a warmer audience than a cold-outreach list.
The collaboration also positions OORI against a Gulf backdrop in which access and distribution, rather than deal origination alone, are becoming the competitive battleground for private-market platforms. Whether an education-led funnel converts into committed capital at scale is the open question, and one worth tracking through the promised webinar and follow-on sessions.
Why This Matters to FinanceX Readers
The commercial signal here is the productisation of a wealth shift that is already under way. As women across the GCC move into higher earnings and senior roles, the firms that build credible, education-led routes into investing stand to capture a disproportionate share of a widening pool of allocatable capital. OORI is an early, small-scale test of whether a regulated platform can turn that demographic change into private-market participation, and of whether investor education can work as a durable acquisition channel rather than a one-off brand exercise. For allocators, wealthtech operators and platform investors tracking the Gulf, the model matters more than this single partnership: it points to where the next round of private-market distribution in the region is likely to be won.
