Anastasia Lukach – Venture Protocol
Dubai pulled in $11.2 billion in foreign direct investment in the first half of 2025 – up 62% year on year, the highest per-capita FDI in the world. The number made the rounds in every LP letter and allocation memo from London to Singapore. What it didn't explain is where that money actually went, who deployed it, and what the operators on the receiving end are seeing that the allocators sending it are not.
I wanted to answer that with someone who isn't pitching a thesis. Not a macro analyst. Not a government official. An operator – someone writing checks, signing leases, tracking which developers are actually building. Max Marka is that person.
Most people who encounter Max know him as a designer. He founded MAX FABRIQUE at 18 in St. Petersburg, built a portfolio of over 700 projects, designed for Givenchy, Louis Vuitton, Dior, Roberto Cavalli, and Miele. He once built a 900-square-meter house for Johnny Depp in Malibu – psychedelic interiors, a rotating spherical cabinet, its own elevator. He won the Trezini Gold Award. He has 474,000 Instagram followers. The public profile reads: designer.
The reality is different. Max is a developer and active capital allocator in the UAE. Development – not design – is his primary profit generator. He sold three buildings in under six months as off-plan assets to a single institutional buyer. Before Dubai, he completed a 50,000-square-meter project in Moscow – six buildings, delivered in 2019. Design revenue built the engine. Development runs it.
Our conversation on Venture Protocol wasn't about aesthetics. It was about capital flows, sector timing, financing structures, and what the next twelve months look like for anyone deploying money in the Gulf.
The route nobody is mapping
Every family office I speak to through Ironcore Partners – where we structure deal flow in the $2 million to $100 million range – asks the same question about the Gulf: where are we in the cycle? Max didn't give me a position on the cycle. He gave me a map of where the money is physically moving.
"Capital is transferring from China through Singapore to the Middle East." Not a trickle. A structural reallocation. Chinese capital, increasingly constrained at home and cautious about Western exposure, is routing through Singapore's financial infrastructure and landing in the Gulf – primarily in real estate, IT and AI, and consumer goods. Max named September 2026 as the month he expects the major influx to hit.
This kind of signal doesn't appear in a Preqin report. It comes from being on the ground – watching who shows up at developer presentations, tracking which holding companies are registering new entities, noticing which sectors are suddenly receiving unsolicited term sheets. The $11.2 billion FDI headline tells you the total. The China-Singapore-Gulf corridor tells you the direction.
Ray Dalio called the region "a Silicon Valley of capitalists." Max is more specific. He sees Dubai as the terminal node of a capital migration that is accelerating because the alternatives are closing. Europe offers limited opportunity at his scale. China is too competitive for foreign-originated capital. So the Gulf gets the money.
The financing contrarian
One of the more striking things Max said was about financing. He prefers UAE banks over external investors. "Banks are better financial partners than investors – less complicated."
That's not the line you hear at pitch events in DIFC. The standard narrative is that bank financing is rigid and collateral-heavy, that equity or venture capital is the sophisticated path. Max's experience runs the other direction. He has raised before – a $1.4 million round for a venture called Clean – but for his core development business, he uses bank debt. Banks have clear terms, predictable timelines, and no board seats. Investors, in his experience, introduce complexity that doesn't scale with the size of the check.
For LPs and GPs watching from outside the region, this is a useful data point. The Gulf's banking infrastructure for real estate and development is more operator-friendly than its reputation suggests. When a developer with Max's track record prefers debt over equity, it says something about the actual cost of capital here.
Where he's buying – and where he's not
I've reviewed over 130 deals across fintech, robotics, software, and consumer verticals. The most useful thing an operator can tell you isn't where to invest. It's where not to.
Max was blunt. Service businesses – avoid for now. Restaurants – six months of difficult conditions ahead. Car dealerships and grocery – headwinds. These aren't theoretical positions. He's watching these sectors from inside the market, tracking lease renewals, staffing churn, revenue lines that don't appear in broker presentations.
His buy thesis: health and wellness clinics with new technology integration. Young population, active health-tech licensing from the government, fragmented sector with few institutional-grade operators. For someone who built 700+ projects across residential and commercial real estate, the playbook is familiar – find the sector where execution quality is the moat, then deploy capital and operational discipline.
Geographic filter: UAE and GCC only. No Europe, no China. Unusual for someone who's had offices in St. Petersburg, Miami, and Dubai. The narrowing is deliberate. A concentration bet on the region he understands best at the moment he thinks the cycle favors it.
The red flags of an operator-investor
I asked Max what kills a deal for him. He didn't talk about unit economics or cap tables. He talked about people.
Four red flags, in order: lack of conviction in their own project, no experience with failure, destructive addictions, and – this one caught me off guard – lack of spirituality. The first three are recognizable to anyone who's done due diligence on founder-led businesses. The fourth doesn't show up in investment memos. Max sees it as a proxy for long-term orientation – the belief in something beyond the immediate transaction.
His evaluation sequence is also unusual. "Idea first, then numbers second." He wants to understand the vision before he opens the model. He requires multiple scenario planning, not one projection but several. And he hires self-motivated operators, giving them final results rather than tasks – a management style that works at his scale (design, development, software, cosmetics) but would break in a larger organization without the culture for it.
The cosmetics play is worth noting separately. Development profits fund MAXIQUE, his luxury cosmetics brand launching in 2027. Real estate cash flow subsidizes a consumer brand launch. He's not raising a Series A for a beauty startup. He's using one cash-generative business to incubate the next. Old-school operator logic.
September 2026
Max named September 2026 twice. Once as the month he expects the capital influx through the China-Singapore-Gulf corridor. Once as the inflection point for sectors currently under pressure – restaurants, services, consumer retail.
He's planning around that timeline. Land acquisitions in September. Cosmetics launch in 2027. A floating building concept – long-term, deliberately unhurried. And the ambition to take a company public, though he didn't share which entity or which exchange.
September 2026 is a named date from someone backing it with his own money. That carries different weight than a consensus forecast.
What the reports miss
I've been in Dubai for over five years. I co-host Tech Tuesday, where 200+ people show up weekly. Through Ironcore, I work with 20+ family offices and talk to over 1,000 investors across the region. The Gulf is not short on data – FDI figures, transaction volumes, population growth, license counts. All publicly available.
What the numbers don't capture is tempo. How fast deals close. Which sectors operators are quietly exiting. Which corridors capital is actually moving through. The specific months when people who are actually deploying expect things to turn.
The standard playbook for an LP considering Gulf exposure: read the macro reports, attend a DIFC conference, meet three fund managers, allocate based on top-down data. The better playbook: find the operators writing checks with their own money and ask them what they see.
Max sees capital migrating through a specific corridor with a named arrival date. Health and wellness as the buy. Restaurants as the avoid. Banks over investors for development-scale projects. September 2026 as the turn.
None of that is in the reports.
Anastasia Lukach hosts Venture Protocol and is an investment executive at Ironcore Partners, where she structures deal flow for family offices in the $2–100M range.
Based on a Venture Protocol episode recorded March 28, 2026.
