The founders of Sapna Ventures built the model for the firm's success.
The firm began with a family and a difficulty. The capital had been earned in a single jurisdiction and held in another, while the heirs for whom it was intended had settled across four continents. Advisers were plentiful yet each one saw only a part of the family’s situation. Nobody had sight of the whole, and nobody in the room was without something to sell.
What that family wanted was an office of its own – staffed by people who only answered to the office itself, who could hold each asset in a single view and who had no product to place. What it got became the template. Other families arrived with the same difficulty and asked for the same arrangement. Sapna Ventures took its present shape in response to those requests and has grown by no other route since.
What Sapna Ventures stands for
Sovereignty
Sapna Ventures does not own proprietary products nor accept commissions, retrocession, placement commissions, or other consideration from any institution whose instruments it may recommend. The firm's revenue is derived in full from the families it represents, and no other party has a financial interest in the advice given.
Candour
Reporting carries the same register regardless of the outcome. Where a position has moved against the firm, it is set out with the reasoning that produced it and an account of what has since been revised. Performance is presented net of all fees and measured against the objectives a family set at the outset.
Stewardship
Decisions are taken on the assumption that the assets concerned will be held for beneficiaries who are not yet party to the discussion and, in a number of cases, not yet born. That assumption governs how risk is sized and how obligations that fall decades from now are provisioned for.
Hospitality
The duties owed to a guest have long been established in this part of the world and Sapna Ventures holds firmly to them. Families are welcomed by a principal at every stage of a relationship, and investment decision-makers remain accessible to them once a mandate has been executed.
Where Sapna Ventures works
The Emirates are the centre of gravity.
Dubai is now within a few hours' flight of a large part of the world's population and has become the place where families from South Asia, the Levant, East Africa and the Mediterranean keep their affairs in order. The regulatory architecture of the DIFC gives that arrangement a common law basis that London and New York families recognise.
Manchester caters to the firm's European interests, its work with EU-domiciled structures and the relationships it maintains with managers on that side of the Atlantic. However, capital is not limited by either direction. Sapna Ventures invests where the asset justifies the trip.
Charitable giving
A number of the families for which Sapna Ventures acts give substantially, and several have done so for generations. Sapna Ventures works alongside specialist organisations: donor-advised platforms, endowment managers, advisers in the relevant jurisdictions and the operating charities themselves.
Giving is structured with the same rigour applied to the rest of the balance sheet, with attention paid to timing, tax treatment, governance, and the question of who will carry out the commitment when the founder is no longer able.
Firm affiliates
