Aajil Capital wins CMA licence to manage investments in Saudi Arabia

Aajil Capital has been licensed by Saudi Arabia's Capital Market Authority to manage investments. The licence, No. 26358-02, came through a resolution dated 22 June 2026 for a Saudi joint stock company still under establishment. The firm has not started regulated activity. It will launch only once the CMA's commencement-of-business requirements are complete.

Plans are Shariah-compliant investment management aimed at industrial small and medium enterprises, a segment investors cannot easily reach. The licence covers the Managing Investments activity. Even so, any investment fund Aajil Capital offers will need CMA approval.

Industrial SMEs sit at the centre of Vision 2030 and the National Industrial Strategy. The wider picture is large. Saudi Arabia's construction pipeline exceeds $1.7 trillion. Officials target 36,000 factories by 2035, against roughly 12,000 now. Bank credit to SMEs runs about 9 percent of the total; Vision 2030 wants 20 percent.

Aajil Capital is the sister firm of Aajil, an AI-driven platform supplying industrial SMEs on deferred payment terms. Aajil buys materials and pays suppliers directly; SMEs settle later, on schedules matched to cash cycles, under Shariah-compliant structures. Underwriting takes hours, not weeks. Materials move within days. As of 31 August 2026, Aajil had supplied SAR 600 million worth of materials — about $160 million.

That origination infrastructure and its transaction data form the backbone of Aajil Capital's investment strategy. The strategy starts from the payment behaviour of the businesses it wants to back, not from a model built on assumptions.

For an asset manager, that data is unusual. Most funds have no direct window into the cash cycles of industrial SMEs. Aajil Capital will build its products on a proprietary set of payment records and underwriting outcomes from its sister platform.

Faisal Chowdhry, CEO and CIO, spent 16 years at Goldman Sachs, where he rose to executive director in London, globally responsible for due diligence on consumer and MSME financial services transactions. His fintech focus covered lending, payments and microfinance. Chowdhry was also in Goldman's European special situations group for five years; his New York start came in structured products and private equity funding. He handled compliance risk for Marcus by Goldman Sachs in the UK. Chowdhry holds an MSc in finance from the London Business School.

"Saudi industrial SMEs are central to the Kingdom's manufacturing and construction growth," he said. "Investors have had no practical way to hold exposure." Aajil Capital's aim, he said, is disciplined access for institutional investors to short-dated, asset-backed exposure to the sector.

Saudi industrial SMEs are central to the Kingdom's manufacturing and construction growth,

Chairman Abdulla Sheikh called the licence an important milestone. The board also includes Ihsan Jawad and Abdulelah Al Saleh.

The licence does not begin operations. Aajil Capital still needs to satisfy the CMA that it is ready, and any fund it files requires approval. What it carries into that process is a sister platform that has already underwritten hundreds of millions in materials — and the data that came with it.