Abu dhabi: At BRIDGE Summit 2025, investment leaders from the public and private sectors came together for a high-energy conversation on value creation, strategic risk taking, and the forces driving capital toward the world's most innovative hubs.
According to Emirates News Agency, Khalfan Belhoul, CEO of Dubai Future Foundation, joined Dr. Ling Ge, Chief Investment and Strategy Officer EMEA at Tencent, in a dialogue titled 'Mobilising Capital for a Future Media Ecosystem' moderated by Rachel Maycock, Managing Partner, Place Advisory and Public Affairs. Despite coming from different sectors, both speakers converged around core principles: relentless experimentation, resilience through setbacks, and a willingness to back ventures solving meaningful problems.
Dr. Ge highlighted Tencent's investment philosophy, focusing on companies with defensible technical depth and the strength of collaborative ecosystems. 'Tencent is a company with a big pool of talent, engineers and scientists, so we try to use our domain expertise to help identify companies with the strongest technical modes, the companies that can't be replicated easily,' she stated. She noted that Tencent's global network enhances startups, contributing to successful investments in firms such as MiniMax and Reddit.
Khalfan Belhoul discussed the UAE's unique environment for innovation, emphasizing Dubai Future Foundation's mandate and culture of experimentation. 'His Highness told us when the foundation was formed, 'you are Dubai's lab',' he said. 'This gave us the comfort to really test and try out new ideas.' He stressed that in the UAE, failure is not a setback but a catalyst, with leaders empowering testing, making mistakes, and learning from failures.
Both speakers identified agile regulation, innovative funding mechanisms, and a digitally native population as key reasons the UAE is emerging as a dynamic centre for investment. Dr. Ge described this as a 'flywheel of innovation,' where talent, capital, and regulatory openness reinforce one another.
The discussion also touched on the disruptive momentum of AI, focusing on systems where human capability and machine intelligence advance together. Both speakers framed this as unlocking a nation's 'cognitive potential,' which will define future competitiveness and reshape global capital flows.
In conclusion, they agreed that these conditions are driving a shift in investment from traditional centres to agile, future-ready hubs like the UAE, where innovation is structurally enabled. This session is part of a 300+ session program at BRIDGE Summit, reflecting its scale and ambition. The summit is held from 8-10 December 2025 at ADNEC in Abu Dhabi.