January 23, 2026 — Hasnae Taleb, Managing Partner of Mintiply Capital and GCC Partner of Fuel Venture Capital, is widening the firm’s investment focus to Morocco, positioning the move as a structured effort to help local startups become “institution-ready” for regional and global capital.
The announcement comes as Taleb’s profile has broadened beyond traditional finance circles following her role as an investor-judge on TV5MONDE’s pan-African entrepreneurship program Les Nouveaux Boss, a competition that culminates in finalists pitching to an investor panel that includes Taleb, Élisabeth Moreno (Ring Capital) and Ali Mnif (Digital Africa).
In a recent interview published alongside the show’s finale, Taleb framed her perspective in blunt, institutional terms: finance, she argued, is ultimately about access, power, and who gets to shape outcomes and she described her approach as built on standards, selectivity, and discipline.
From TV studio to term sheets: a Morocco thesis with an access agenda
Taleb’s Morocco expansion is being pitched less as a geographic checkbox and more as a continuation of what she says she was looking for on the show: founders with execution, clarity, and the ability to scale into real businesses. In the TV5MONDE format, finalists have minutes, not hours, to demonstrate investability; the goal is to convince at least one juror to back them.
That compressed intensity, Taleb suggested in her interview, mirrors the real market: attention is cheap, but trust is earned through performance and repeatable results.
For Hasnae Taleb, the Morocco thesis rests on three factors people close to the firm describe as increasingly hard to ignore:
- Founder quality is rising: Moroccan startups are being built with cross-border ambitions earlier particularly across MENA, Europe, and Francophone Africa which makes the market more legible to institutional allocators.
- A strategic corridor advantage: Morocco’s geographic and commercial positioning gives founders a natural runway for international expansion, especially when paired with Gulf partnerships and distribution.
- High-impact sectors with scalable demand: The firm is prioritizing categories where Morocco’s talent and operating conditions can translate into regional leadership, ranging from fintech and logistics to agritech and climate resilience.
The dealflow signal: Sand to Green draws investor attention
One of the show’s Morocco-linked pitches that has drawn attention is Sand to Green, presented by Wissal Ben Moussa, a Moroccan agricultural engineer and the company’s co-founder. TV5MONDE’s own press materials list Ben Moussa and Sand to Green among the finalists in the program’s grand finale.
Sand to Green’s proposition sits at the intersection of regenerative agriculture, desertification mitigation, and agricultural resilience. On the company’s site, Sand to Green traces its origins to a family farm in southern Morocco, where Ben Moussa began testing agroforestry-based approaches to restore degraded land-work the company says later evolved into a scalable model. Independent profiles also describe Ben Moussa as a co-founder and operational lead focused on restoring soils and rebuilding biodiversity through regenerative methods.
Taleb has indicated privately that her team intends to take a closer look at Sand to Green following the pitch, according to people familiar with the discussions. Mintiply Capital has not publicly disclosed whether it has issued a term sheet or entered formal diligence, and the firm typically does not comment on potential transactions until a mandate or investment is finalized.
The broader bet
The timing is not accidental. Les Nouveaux Boss has given African founders a high-visibility platform and provided investors an unusually direct view into the continent’s next generation of operators. For Taleb, the Morocco expansion is intended to convert that visibility into something more durable: repeatable access to capital, and repeatable standards that turn talent into investable scale.
And by anchoring the announcement with a concrete pipeline example, like Sand to Green, Hasnae is signaling what it wants Morocco’s ecosystem to become: not a market defined by promise, but one defined by performance.
