Abu Dhabi: At BRIDGE Summit 2025 — the world’s largest debut media event — investment leaders from the public and private sectors came together for a high-energy conversation on value creation, strategic risk taking, and the forces driving capital toward the world’s most innovative hubs. H.E. Khalfan Belhoul, CEO of Dubai Future Foundation, joined Dr. Ling Ge, Chief Investment and Strategy Officer EMEA at Tencent, in a wide-ranging dialogue titled ‘Mobilising Capital for a Future Media Ecosystem’ moderated by Rachel Maycock, Managing Partner, Place Advisory & Public Affairs.

Despite coming from different sectors, both speakers converged around core principles: relentless experimentation, resilience through setbacks, and a willingness to back ventures solving meaningful problems.

Dr. Ge underscored Tencent's investment philosophy, emphasizing the search for companies with defensible technical depth and the power of collaborative ecosystems. “Tencent is a company with a big pool of talent, engineers and scientists, so we try to use our domain expertise to help identify companies with the strongest technical modes, the companies that can't be replicated easily,” she said.

She noted that Tencent’s global network helps sharpen the edge of startups, contributing to successful investments in firms such as MiniMax and Reddit.

H.E. Khalfan Belhoul spoke about the UAE’s unique environment for innovation, highlighting Dubai Future Foundation’s mandate and culture of experimentation. “His Highness told us when the foundation was formed, ‘you are Dubai’s lab’,” he said. “This gave us the comfort to really test and try out new ideas.”
 

He emphasized that in the UAE, failure is not a setback but a catalyst. “If you have leaders that are willing to empower testing, making mistakes, failing, and learning, you know that the failing component is not necessarily looked at as failure.”

Both speakers pointed to agile regulation, innovative funding mechanisms, and a digitally native population as key reasons the UAE is emerging as one of the world’s most dynamic centres for investment. Dr. Ge described this as a “flywheel of innovation,” where talent, capital, and regulatory openness reinforce one another.

The discussion also addressed the disruptive momentum of AI, but with a clear focus: the future belongs to systems where human capability and machine intelligence advance together.
 Both speakers framed this as unlocking a nation’s “cognitive potential” — a synergy that will define future competitiveness and reshape where global capital flows.

In closing, they agreed that these conditions are accelerating a significant shift: investment is increasingly moving from traditional centres towards agile, future-ready hubs like the UAE — hubs where innovation is not simply welcomed but structurally enabled.

This session forms part of a 300+ session program that reflects BRIDGE Summit’s scale and ambition. The debut edition of BRIDGE Summit takes place from 8–10 December 2025 at ADNEC in Abu Dhabi.

For more information and to register, visit https://www.bridgesummit.com/en/