.jpg){kind=logo}
Benoît Tamalet — Founder & Managing Director.
Former French diplomat. Twenty years between Paris, Riyadh, Doha, Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Builder of bridges that hold under pressure.
My career started where most diplomatic careers don't: at the IAEA in Vienna, as a safeguards information analyst working in Arabic, French, English and Spanish. Five years of intelligence work taught me one thing — the most important question is never the visible one.
I then served four years at the Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Paris, advising the Saudi Minister for Education and Health on Western Europe — and another nine years at the French Embassy in Riyadh, leading bilateral healthcare cooperation across the GCC. Few French operators have stood on both sides of the table. It changes how you read a deal.
In Riyadh, I led the negotiation and signature of 23 bilateral agreements representing €3.2 billion in cumulative value, organized seven ministerial visits, and shaped the French presence at every major regional health summit. I learned that capital and diplomacy are the same conversation, conducted with different vocabularies.
Since 2017, I have built GHA International from Dubai as an independent advisory practice. I joined iBionext as Operating Partner in 2019 to bring deeptech and biotech scale-ups into the Gulf capital ecosystem. Since 2020, I have led two landmark sovereign-anchored operations: a CAC40 retailer's strategic round with the Saudi Public Investment Fund, and a US gaming scale-up's Term Sheet–to–SPA process with the Abu Dhabi Investment Office.
Today, I work with a small number of clients each year — corporates, scale-ups and private equity funds — who need both diplomatic-grade Gulf access and the operational discipline to bring a deal home. The bridge is not the metaphor. It is the work.