Advice you cannot execute is entertainment
We only recommend what we are prepared to be held to. If we cannot describe who does it, by when, and what it costs, it does not go in the document.
A firm built around one corridor.
Clovantis was founded in Dubai in 2026 on a simple observation: the Gulf has the demand and the capital, Africa has the talent and the cost base, and almost nobody is accountable for the whole journey between them.
The thesis
Two regions that need each other, and a gap in between.
Gulf economies are diversifying faster than their labour markets can supply. Localisation targets, headquarters rules and rising salaries make some functions structurally expensive to run on the ground — while the demand for them keeps growing.
Six hundred kilometres across the Mediterranean and down the Nile, the opposite problem exists. Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt produce far more trained engineers, analysts and multilingual service professionals than their domestic economies absorb. West and East Africa are closing the same gap a few years behind.
The arbitrage is obvious. Executing it is not. It requires a licence in one jurisdiction, a labour contract in another, a data-transfer agreement between them, and a management layer that is credible in a Riyadh boardroom and in a Casablanca hiring market on the same day. That is the work we chose.
At a glance
- Founded
- 2026
- Headquarters
- Dubai Silicon Oasis, UAE
- Focus
- GCC ↔ Africa corridor
- Working languages
- English, French, Arabic
- Markets covered
- 14 across two regions
- Engagement model
- Fixed scope, staged
What we believe
Five positions that shape every engagement.
A fast no is a service
Telling a client that a market is not worth entering costs us the follow-on mandate. It is still the right answer often enough that we make a habit of saying it.
Local is not a slide, it is a person
Regulatory nuance lives with the people who deal with the regulator weekly. We build around them rather than around a database.
The cost model is the strategy
Most expansion decisions are won or lost on fully loaded unit economics, not on market size. We spend our time where the decision actually turns.
Design the exit on day one
An adviser who becomes load-bearing has failed. Every engagement specifies what you own at the end and how the handover happens.
Leadership
Small by design.
Senior people do the work. There is no pyramid here to feed, which is why the person in the first meeting is the person in the last one.
Yassine Ayari
Founder
Leads client engagements across the corridor, from market assessment through entity structuring and delivery centre build.
Advisory network
GCC & Africa
Vetted legal, tax and regulatory specialists in each market we cover, engaged per mandate rather than carried as overhead.
Your name here
Open roles
We are looking for operators who have actually opened a market — not described one. Write to us if that is you.
Partner with us
Referral & delivery
Law firms, accountancies and technology vendors who need a corridor partner rather than a competitor.
How we work
The commercial terms, stated plainly.
Fixed scope first
Every engagement begins with a written scope, a named deliverable and a fee. Change requests are priced before they are started, not after.
Pass-through at cost
Government fees, licence charges and third-party costs are billed exactly as incurred, with receipts attached. We do not mark them up.
Stage gates, not lock-in
Long programmes are broken into stages with a decision point at each boundary. You can stop at any gate and keep everything produced so far.
One point of contact
A single senior lead owns your mandate end to end, including the specialists we bring in. You never coordinate our supply chain.
Confidentiality by default
We do not name clients without written permission, and we decline mandates that would put us on both sides of a competitive situation.
Three working languages
English, French and Arabic across meetings, filings and deliverables — which on this corridor removes an entire category of translation risk.
Next step
Tell us the market.
Tell us the market.
We will tell you what it takes.
A thirty-minute call, no deck. You describe where you want to be in eighteen months; we tell you honestly what stands between you and it — and whether we are the right people to help.