Three Paths Past Silicon Valley. Venture Capital Models in Russia, Central Asia and the Middle East

The paper tests a single proposition, namely that the venture capital markets of Russia, Central Asia and the Middle East follow trajectories of their own rather than reproducing the American model with a lag, the differences between them being set by the volume of long-term capital available and by the design of the intermediary through which that capital reaches companies. The comparison rests on 2024–2025 data for four markets and on the three pillars of any venture contract, namely the source of long-term capital, the allocation of losses on failed projects and the exit channel. The American model is shown to depend on the position of the reserve-currency issuer, whose currency accounted for 57.1 per cent of allocated world foreign exchange reserves in the first quarter of 2026. Russia, with a market of 159 million dollars in 2025 and a 67 per cent contraction of the seed segment, has moved to an industrial and corporate model. Central Asia builds on jurisdictional competition and joint funds of funds, while the Middle East builds on a sovereign anchor investor, with more than half of the regional volume raised as debt. Four implications are tested. A regression of the Russian series on the American one over 2016–2025 with a level shift dates the break to 2022, puts the residual deviation from the global cycle at 87 per cent and yields an 11.5-fold gap against the counterfactual for 2025. A comparison of deal-count growth rates rejects the common-trajectory-with-a-lag account, the ratio of rates for Russia and MENA being 0.546, and the finding holds even when the dispersion of the data is five times what the model assumes. Recovering the distribution of deal sizes gives Gini coefficients of 0.77 for Russia, 0.92 for Central Asia and MENA and 0.98 for the United States, the Central Asian figure being produced by a single transaction and therefore uninformative. A cross-section of thirteen countries including Russia and Kazakhstan finds GDP per capita significant and the Hofstede dimensions adding nothing demonstrable, while Russian venture investment per capita turns out to be about one twenty-sixth of the level its GDP per capita predicts. A review of light-touch licensing regimes for venture fund managers shows that the Abu Dhabi framework of 2017 preceded the Singapore one and that the rules of the Astana International Financial Centre reproduce the former.