Jay Rosen
Founder & CEO, Hikma Capital Partners
Jay Rosen is a global private markets investment executive and the Founder and CEO of Hikma Capital Partners, a boutique investment, advisory, and asset management platform that partners with owners, developers, and investors to originate, structure, and execute complex transactions across real estate, private equity, and venture capital. He specializes in large-scale hospitality and mixed-use developments where capital markets strategy, operating platform design, and long-term asset management must work together as a cohesive investment framework. He is distinguished by a rare combination of deep capital markets expertise and genuine operating experience, a perspective forged at the intersection of global investment and the real estate businesses that underpin it.
Over more than two decades, Jay has been involved in more than $25 billion in investments across real estate, private equity, and venture capital. As Group CFO of Red Sea Global, he was a member of the founding executive team that built one of the world’s most ambitious sovereign-backed development platforms, playing a central role in the creation of The Red Sea Project and AMAALA as part of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030. Before that, he was part of the founding executive team behind Baha Mar, a landmark $3.5 billion destination resort in the Bahamas. Earlier roles at Interstate Hotels and Hyatt Hotels grounded his experience in acquisitions, development, and asset management at the property level.
Across these experiences, Jay developed a deep understanding of how structure shapes outcomes in complex hospitality and real estate projects. Large-scale developments involve competing priorities across owners, operators, investors, and communities, with decisions made early in the process carrying long-term implications for how assets are financed, built, and experienced. His work increasingly focuses on creating the frameworks that align these interests, ensuring that investment and operational decisions are grounded in a clear understanding of tradeoffs, risk, and long-term value rather than the path of least resistance.
At CRH, Jay contributes an investment and development perspective, helping connect the case for responsible hospitality to the language that actually moves capital. His experience across sovereign, institutional, and private capital markets ensures that the conversation are responsibility is grounded not only in operations, but in how projects are conceived, financed, and sustained over time.
Jay also serves as a Managing Board Member of the Club Control Body of the Saudi Arabian Football Federation. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration.
First job in hospitality
Working summers at my local tennis club in St. Louis, running the pro shop, stringing racquets, and helping members book courts.
A moment that changed how they see hospitality
Being part of the team that built Baha Mar. Watching a major resort development reshape a community and a country, creating real opportunity for Bahamians while also confronting the risks and responsibilities that come with that scale, made the stakes of getting hospitality right feel very real.
What they notice first in a hotel
Whether it makes an emotional connection in the first few minutes. Design and service are both part of it, but what I’m really registering is whether the place has a coherent identity and whether it makes you feel something. That first impression is hard to manufacture and harder to recover from if it’s missed.
What responsibility looks like in practice
Decisions made before the first shovel goes in the ground. If responsibility isn’t embedded in the investment thesis, it rarely survives the pressures of development and operation.