How a founder rebuilt his business and launched a venture studio

In 2022, one of my clients came close to losing his business.

He ran an agricultural trading business operating across dozens of countries, exporting hundreds of thousands of tonnes and generating tens of millions of dollars in revenue. The Black Sea region supplied 95% of his goods. When trade there was paralysed, shipping stopped, supply chains broke down, and banks stopped processing international payments.

Working capital fell from $15 million to $2 million. The company no longer had the funds to keep operating.

As the old business model broke down, the team looked for opportunities created by the disruption. Many private investors had foreign-currency deposits they couldn't move out of the country. They needed somewhere to invest that money.

The team saw an opportunity to let those investors finance export transactions in niche agricultural products. Investors would be funding physical goods, with clear margins and oversight at each stage.

The minimum investment was $1 million. Investors could receive a share of the trading margin or provide a loan denominated in a foreign currency.

The first investors were the classic friends, family, and fools. The idea worked: in the first few months, the company raised around $4 million and tripled its working capital. But when they tried to scale up, progress stalled. The offer worked and there was interest, yet the fundraising process wasn't scaling.

That was when he came to work with me.

We explored different groups of investors and interviewed them to understand what was stopping them from committing. We set measurable goals and started running experiments in sprints, testing and refining our assumptions as we went.

After a couple of months, we knew which investors to focus on and how to approach them. Fundraising picked up. Within six months, working capital had reached $10 million. By early 2025, it had reached $50 million.

That created a medium-term competitive advantage: access to capital at a lower cost than its competitors. Fundraising became a business function in its own right, with a process that could be repeated and scaled.

At the beginning of 2025, the founder launched a Dubai venture studio for AI-first B2B products in international trade.

Its portfolio includes a financial startup that recorded $150 million in turnover in its first year, alongside AI Buyer and AI Trader, products changing how international trade works.

Growth Tracking gave the team a way to work through the uncertainty: identify the right customers, find the bottlenecks, and choose what to tackle first. It helped them move from discussion to action and build momentum. What began as a search for a solution became a repeatable process that no longer needed the founder's constant involvement.

In two and a half years, the company went from near bankruptcy to $50 million in working capital, with a process that could scale without the founder overseeing every step.