Jigar Sagar
Building The Digital Backbone Of Entrepreneurship In The UAE & Bey
By Jane Stevens
For more than fifteen years, Jigar Sagar has been quietly shaping the UAE’s digital ecosystem, working at the intersection of government services, free zones, and entrepreneurship. Looking ahead, he believes the next major wave of digital transformation will move far beyond websites and portals. Free zones and government services, he says, will evolve into intelligent systems that anticipate business needs before founders even ask. Drawing from deep experience inside UAE free zones, he envisions unified platforms that handle licensing, renewals, banking, compliance, and immigration automatically in the background. The true transformation lies in removing administrative friction so entrepreneurs can focus on decisions that actually build value.
Having founded and scaled more than thirty ventures with a combined value exceeding three hundred and fifty million dollars, Sagar’s decision making has become sharply focused. Today, he evaluates every new tech or AI venture through one defining lens, will it become mission critical in someone’s daily workflow, or is it merely a nice addition. If a product does not save time, reduce cost, or unlock new revenue at scale, he is willing to walk away. In his view, real innovation is not about buzzwords or polished presentations, but about removing pain points and changing behavior in meaningful ways.
One of Sagar’s most notable contributions has been enabling the launch of over two hundred and fifty thousand entrepreneurs. To double that number in the next decade, he believes the ecosystem must undergo a fundamental shift. The answer lies in frictionless startup infrastructure. He imagines a one-click experience that covers company registration, banking, payments, and essential digital tools across borders. By standardizing onboarding across free zones, banks, and service providers into a single interoperable layer, millions of aspiring founders could move from idea to operation with unprecedented speed.
The COVID 19 pandemic served as a real world stress test for business systems, and Sagar notes that five percent of all UAE company setups during that period came through his platforms. The lesson was clear, resilience cannot be optional. Systems that survived and thrived were digital by default, equipped with remote identity verification, electronic signatures, automated approvals, and online payments. Going forward, every business process must be designed with the assumption that physical access could disappear overnight, with redundancy, self service, and real time support built in from the start.
By 2030, Sagar believes autonomous workflows, digital identity, and real time data will redefine how businesses are set up and regulated. The process will shift from static form filling to a living, data driven relationship between founders and regulators.
Verified digital identities will allow entrepreneurs to launch companies, secure permits, and open bank accounts in minutes rather than weeks. Compliance will become adaptive rather than punitive, increasing speed for startups while maintaining trust and safety for authorities. After a successful exit from the UAE’s largest corporate services provider, Sagar sees a new blueprint emerging for scaling and exiting service based tech ecosystems.
The future belongs to platform plus ecosystem models rather than traditional company plus client structures. Businesses that own standardized infrastructure such as data layers, workflows, and integrations create network effects that are difficult to replicate. This approach builds defensibility and long term value, making such companies far more attractive at scale.
Through Triliv Holdings, which blends AI, finance, and emerging technologies, Sagar’s investment thesis is sharply defined. His next ten ventures will focus on AI powered infrastructure that helps entrepreneurs move faster in areas like compliance, finance, recruitment, and cross border expansion. He looks for businesses where AI is deeply embedded into the operating model rather than added as a surface feature, and where the model can scale across markets with an asset light structure and strong recurring revenue.
Managing over three thousand employees across his companies, Sagar is also rethinking how teams operate in an AI driven future. His approach is to make AI the first layer of execution while keeping humans as the final layer of judgment. Every role is being redesigned around three questions, what can AI automate, what decisions must remain human, and how people can be trained to use AI as leverage rather than fear it. This balance ensures speed and efficiency without sacrificing accountability or ethics. As an investor judge on The Final Pitch Dubai, Sagar has observed founders at their most vulnerable, pitching under pressure. This experience has sharpened his ability to assess entrepreneurs beyond the slide deck.
Clarity of thought, emotional resilience, and coachability now matter more to him than perfectly polished numbers. When evaluating founders off screen, he often asks whether they would still lead effectively under public pressure a year from now, or whether their narrative would collapse once the spotlight fades.
At the core of Sagar’s long term vision is an ambitious goal, to empower one hundred million entrepreneurs worldwide. He believes this can only be achieved through a universal entrepreneur operating system built around four foundational pillars, Purpose, People, Product, and Process. Purpose provides direction and resilience, People ensure the right teams are built, Product creates differentiation, and Process allows technology, automation, and AI to carry the operational load. By pairing this four pillar framework with a trusted digital passport for founders, entrepreneurship becomes accessible infrastructure rather than a privilege. For Jigar Sagar, this is how ambition turns into impact, and how the digital backbone of global entrepreneurship can finally be built at scale.
