BlueFive keeps dealmaking pace through the war, from Bugatti to a new defense play

The two pools with public sizes come to $4.2 billion between them, about 28 percent of the $15 billion BlueFive says it manages ^[1]. The bigger of the two, Onyx, closed before the war ^[4]. That one fund is a fifth of assets ^[2]. So the largest single number behind the case that Gulf sovereigns kept committing through the fighting is money committed before the fighting began.

Ben-Gacem's own two sentences about conditions point in different directions. Speaking to private capital investors in Dubai last week, he said of fundraising that "it's a pain in the you-know-what" ^[7]. On deployment he told Semafor he was surprised there was no difference in the pace and scale of investment, particularly in the strategic sectors that continue to accelerate: technology, agri and food security, infra ^[8]. Raising money and spending it are different jobs, and one can be hard while the other runs unchanged. For a limited partner deciding whether to re-up, the second sentence is the one that matters.

For the LP side, the record is his description of his own conversations. "The bulk of our LPs tend to be entrepreneurial sovereign pockets," he said, and "Our discussions are not, 'let's slow down'" ^[9][10]. He added: "Even the smaller ones, even Bahrain, have a clear agenda where they want to deploy their capital" ^[11]. On the defense launch he stayed coy on further details, Semafor reported ^[14].

The disclosed capital is deployed outside the region it was raised in. Onyx buys AI, biotech and advanced computing in the US and Europe ^[4], the $1.2 billion is in China ^[12], and the next office after Beijing is Jakarta ^[17]. The Gulf-facing piece of it is automation bought abroad and brought home, which Ben-Gacem tied to the region's reliance on expat labor for services and tourism: he said addressing that gap today through automation is an important trend ^[16].

The counter-thesis has two versions. The first is that Onyx is only a fifth of assets, leaving roughly $12 billion raised elsewhere ^[2] on undisclosed dates, so a wartime close may already exist and simply be unreported. The second runs the other way: commitments signed before the war and drawn down over the following quarters would produce this same picture of undiminished deployment whatever appetite looks like now.

In my view the evidence supports a narrower statement than continuity of Gulf sovereign appetite through a regional war. A manager founded in 2024 by a 30-year Investcorp veteran ^[2] got to $15 billion ^[1], took a 30 percent stake in Bugatti ^[6], put $1.2 billion into China for technology transfer ^[12], and has a defense vehicle six months from a Ramadan meal to "ready to launch it" ^[13]. The only close with a date attached is the pre-war one. A fund closed after the interceptions began, with a size and a date attached, would make his description of LP behaviour measurable.