Written by Ethan M. Stone
Ask Akash Bhojwani why he built his firm in Dubai and the answer comes without hesitation. "Dubai is where Gulf capital looks for yield and where Indian founders look for global markets. There is no other city where those two currents meet with this much force."
Bhojwani is the Founder and Managing Director of Arclight Capital, a holding and advisory firm built around the UAE-India corridor, a relationship now worth more than $85 billion in bilateral trade. Some 3.5 million Indians live in the UAE, and the two economies are more intertwined than at any point in modern history.
For Bhojwani, whose career began in his family's well-established retail enterprises in India before years spent on rural financial inclusion, the corridor is not an abstraction. It is a daily working reality. Arclight combines strategic advisory, investment advisory and long-term holdings under one roof, connecting Gulf capital with operators on the ground in India, and increasingly in Southeast Asia and Africa.
The next chapter
The firm's current focus may surprise those who associate Dubai finance with towers and trading floors. Bhojwani believes the corridor's next great business is rural: bringing modern payments, credit and insurance to the hundreds of millions of people who work in agriculture across India and beyond.
"Agriculture is the last big unbanked industry on earth," he says. "India has built world-class digital rails, identity, payments, consent-based data. Once a farmer's harvest exists as data, you can lend against a real crop cycle and settle an insurance claim within hours of a failed monsoon. The technology finally matches the problem."
The Gulf connection is direct. "Food security is a strategic priority across this region. These are countries that import most of what they eat," he says. "De-risking the farms the Gulf buys from is not charity. It is strategic infrastructure, and sovereign capital is starting to treat it that way."
It is a long game, and Bhojwani prefers it that way. "This is a space where you underwrite in years, not quarters," he says. "The capital that wins in emerging markets is the capital that shows up early and stays. Dubai understands that better than anywhere. This city was itself a long-term bet that paid off."
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