QIA Brand Guidelines: Qatar’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, Founded in Doha in 2005

Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund.

The Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) is the sovereign wealth fund of the State of Qatar, based in Doha. Its website says it was established in 2005 “to protect and grow Qatar’s financial assets and to diversify the economy,” and describes it as the “wealth manager for the State of Qatar,” investing the state’s surpluses for future generations. English Wikipedia says it was set up to manage the country’s oil and natural gas surpluses, and that before 2005 the Ministry of Finance had a small in-house team investing budget surpluses.

QIA’s own timeline sets out the early years. It was established by an Amiri decision in 2005 that defined its objectives and governance, and it reports to the Supreme Council for Economic Affairs and Investment. Its investment operations began in 2006, and in 2007 its focus shifted to direct investments. In 2008, it says, it co-authored the Santiago Principles, a set of 24 governance principles for sovereign wealth funds, and became a founding member of the International Forum of Sovereign Wealth Funds; English Wikipedia also lists it as a founding member of that forum.

The fund built up its own investment teams between 2009 and 2015, its timeline says, set up a graduate training scheme for Qatari nationals in 2010 and opened an advisory office in New York in 2015. In 2017 it was one of six founding members of the One Planet Sovereign Wealth Fund group, a climate-related initiative. In 2020 it carried out a strategic reorganisation with a new approach to asset allocation, and its chief executive announced at the World Economic Forum that it would make no new investments in fossil fuels, the timeline says. A further Amiri decision of 16 May 2023 reorganised QIA and replaced the 2005 decision. Mohammed Saif Al-Sowaidi was appointed chief executive in 2024.

Subsidiaries, property and partners.

QIA describes a three-fold mandate: to create long-term value for the state and future generations, to support the development of a competitive Qatari economy, and to stabilise the local economy when necessary. Its portfolio pages group holdings by sector, from real estate, infrastructure and healthcare to technology, media and telecoms, financial institutions, retail and consumer, and industrials and materials, alongside funds and liquid securities. The site also runs a Fund of Funds programme, with published eligibility criteria and pages on selection and applications, and its careers section names the Journey Program and a QIA Scholarship Program. English Wikipedia notes that QIA does not publish its holdings to the market.

Much of the fund works through subsidiaries. English Wikipedia lists among them Qatar Holding; the property company Qatari Diar, which it says QIA established in 2005 and which is based in Lusail; and the hotel owner Katara Hospitality. Real estate has produced some of its most visible holdings: in 2015 Brookfield Properties and QIA took over London’s Canary Wharf Group, English Wikipedia says.

The fund has been reorganising its home portfolio. In September 2026 Semafor reported that QIA’s domestic assets — including Qatar Airways, Qatar National Bank and an AI company called Qai — were being moved into a new division, Doha Investment, which would hold more than 40 companies and build new businesses in advanced manufacturing, healthcare and supply chains. The restructuring had been under discussion since 2017, Semafor said.

Abroad, QIA works through partnerships with asset managers. In January 2026, Arab News reported, QIA and Goldman Sachs Asset Management agreed to target joint investments in funds and co-investments. In September 2026 QIA and J.P. Morgan Asset Management signed a memorandum of understanding for a partnership covering public equities and private credit for established US mid-sized companies, the same paper reported; it was announced as a memorandum, not a completed agreement, at the time of writing.

Design and documentation.

Sovereign wealth funds and large public pension investors rarely advertise. They manage money for governments or for pension members rather than for retail customers, and their public identity is built mostly from documents: annual reports, responsible-investment reports, governance pages and press releases about individual deals. Norway’s oil fund publishes a year-by-year timeline of its own growth; Singapore’s GIC publishes a report each July with its 20-year returns, while explaining on its website why it does not disclose the size of its assets.

Their websites tend to be restrained. They lead with a mandate — preserving national wealth, paying pensions, investing for future generations — and support it with portfolio overviews, lists of holdings, leadership pages and statements of values. Several also publish stewardship material: how they vote at company meetings, how they engage with boards, and which companies they have excluded or placed under observation, and why. NBIM’s exclusion list, which gives a criterion and a date for each company, is one example.

Their physical presence is usually a handful of offices in financial districts rather than shops or products. NBIM lists offices in Oslo, London, New York and Singapore; English Wikipedia describes GIC’s network of 11 offices in financial capitals. What the public sees of them is mostly a name or a set of initials, a limited palette, and pages of text and charts.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each institution — when it was founded, who owns it, what it is mandated to do and how it presents itself — using dated sources and the institutions’ own words, attributed as such. Occasionally one steps outside that register, as GIC did in October 2026 with The Secret Vault, a public exhibition marking its 45th anniversary.

A maroon mark and a short set of words.

QIA’s identity, on its own website, is a maroon one. The logo, labelled “QIA Qatar Investment Authority” on the site, appears in a deep maroon and in a white version for dark backgrounds. The site’s stylesheet calls for Frutiger LT Arabic, a version of the Frutiger sans-serif, in light, regular and bold weights, and the site runs in English and Arabic.

Its website states three values — integrity, respect and responsibility — and links to pages on governance, tax policy and sustainability. It says the government of Qatar has determined that QIA is “a savings fund whose objective is investing for the benefit of Qatar’s future generations,” and ties its work to the Qatar National Vision 2030. Besides its headquarters in Doha, it lists QIA Advisory offices in the United States and the Asia-Pacific region, and its footer carries a whistleblowing page and a fraud warning next to the newsroom.

For a design guide, QIA shows how a fund that does not publish its holdings presents itself through a short set of words: mandate, values and future generations. Compare Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi state investor, and Brookfield Asset Management, part of the Brookfield group that teamed up with QIA at Canary Wharf in 2015. For this guide we use a deep maroon, pearl and a dune gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep QIA’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.