Hala Fadel is a co-founder and managing partner at Leap Ventures, a venture capital firm that focuses on global technologies companies with operations in MENA and Europe. She has 20 years of experience in finance and entrepreneurship, working as a portfolio manager for 12 years in European Equities at Comgest, a €20bn growth equity fund focused on investing in growth companies. During her time at Comgest, the fund grew about tenfold becoming a well established outperforming global growth fund.

Hala started her career in 1996 at Merril Lynch in London in mergers and acquisition.

In 2000, Hala founded Booleo, a telecom software business that was later acquired as an internal solution by a client.

She also founded and chairs the MIT Enterprise Forum of the pan-Arab region, an organization that promotes entrepreneurship and organizes, among other things, the MIT Arab start-up competition since 2006, receiving thousands of applications every year from 20 countries, and the Innovate for Refugee Initiative. She recently co-founded the MIT ReACT hub delivering Computer and data science certificates from MIT to displaced populations.

Hala also sits on the board of the MIT Sloan School of Management and the global board of the MIT Enterprise Forum.

She graduated from HEC in France in 1997 with a Masters in Financial Economics and attended the Berkeley Haas School of Business, she holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management.