Getting hands on

Just as Lebanon’s startup ecosystem is growing, so is the diversity of its funding sources. Abdallah and Ghaith Yafi are the brother duo behind Y Venture Partners (YVP), a new, early stage investment and advisory firm. Prior to starting this venture, they founded Lebanese ecommerce site ScoopCity as well as Canadian ecommerce site TheVolts. Executive sat down to discuss their latest — and likely most ambitious — project.   Under Y Venture Partners, you launched a microfund at the beginning of the year. What triggered this? AY: It came as a very natural extension of what we do. Ghaith and I have been in entrepreneurship, in startups for the past five years. That is, we already started a couple of ventures and scaled them … both quite nicely. One of them in Canada and one of them in Lebanon, both of them ecommerce businesses. The one in Canada we partially exited.