Karl Naim

Karl Naïm is an entrepreneur, angel investor, and investment professional currently serving as Group Chief Commercial Officer and SEO Middle East at XBTO. XBTO lists him on its leadership team as “Group CCO & SEO Middle East,” and describes the firm as a full-service digital asset investment firm focused on risk-adjusted strategies across digital assets.

Before XBTO, Naïm built a career across traditional finance and private markets. In his own Entrepreneur Middle East article, he wrote that he graduated from the American University of Beirut with a BSc in Economics in 2004, completed an MSc in Economics and Finance at Warwick Business School in 2005, worked at UBS and Goldman Sachs, completed an MBA at London Business School in 2009, joined Mubadala, and finished his corporate career at UBS in 2015.

He moved into angel investing around 2012 while at Mubadala, using banking and private-equity skills to diligence technology deals. In a 2018 essay, he said that by 2013 he had reviewed more than 15 deals and invested in three startups: PayPlug, Prestodiag, and Shopological, formerly SalesGossip.

Naïm then became an operator. He co-founded ChefXChange in 2014 with Marc Washington, building a private-chef marketplace across Dubai, London, Beirut, and Washington, DC. He later co-founded Purpl, a Lebanon-focused digital wallet and remittance aggregator, serving as CEO until November 2023 before joining XBTO in 2024 to lead its Middle East expansion from Abu Dhabi Global Market.

• Naïm’s public angel activity began through London Business School and finance networks, where he sourced early-stage tech deals and applied business-plan, financial-modeling, and diligence skills.
• His verified angel-stage investments include fintech/payments, food-safety diagnostics, and fashion retail commerce; his more recent public angel participation is in AI and prediction-market trading infrastructure through Elastics.
• He has said, “a start-up success is a measure of disruption, empowerment and community building,” a useful lens for founders pitching him.
• His operator thesis at Purpl centered on financial inclusion: The National quoted him saying Purpl’s vision was to “connect, empower and enable financial access to all in Lebanon and eventually in the Mena region.”
• At XBTO, his focus is institutional digital assets: regulated custody, execution, risk frameworks, portfolio construction, active management, and education for family offices and institutional allocators.