Beyond Capital: UTOPIA's Alina Truhina On How Her Qatar-Based Enterprise Is Rethinking Venture Building In Emerging And Frontier Markets

When the Qatar-based investment platform UTOPIA launched its new venture capital arm, A-typical Ventures, at Web Summit Qatar last year, it marked an important milestone for the platform’s ambitions in early-stage enterprise building. But venture capital is only one part of UTOPIA’s model. In fact, Alina Truhina, Founding Partner of UTOPIA, tells Inc. Arabia that the platform operates across multiple distinct but tightly integrated layers designed to work together as a single venture-building system.

At the foundation sits UTOPIA, which launches investment vehicles into emerging and frontier markets, with the aim of driving commercial returns. Then there’s the UTOPIA Studio, backed by the Qatar Development Bank, which co-builds companies from the ground up, hand in hand with domain experts. Next comes A-typical Ventures, a Doha-based venture fund backed by the Qatar Investment Authority, which deploys early-stage capital into “atypical” founders tackling high-conviction problem spaces across the Middle East, Turkey, and Pakistan. Finally, there’s the Radical Fund, also backed by the Qatar Investment Authority, which invests in early-stage founders solving climate transition challenges in Southeast Asia. Plus, to support all of its activities, the firm has developed an operating system (OS) called UTOPIA OS, a shared, artificial intelligence (AI)-native infrastructure and compute stack that lowers the cost and complexity of building technology-intensive businesses.

“At its core, UTOPIA is an integrated venture platform that combines funds, a venture studio, and AI-native infrastructure to support founders from idea to Series A across emerging and frontier markets,” Truhina explains. “Instead of founders having to piece together funding, technical talent, and market access from different places, we bring those elements together under one roof.” According to Truhina, the UTOPIA model, when put together, “lowers the cost of innovation, shortens the time to scale, and helps founders to build businesses that last in markets that are often underserved by traditional venture capital.” 

Such a structure also reflects UTOPIA’s conviction that the next wave of globally relevant companies will emerge from founders in underserved markets. “We believe the next generation of globally relevant companies, particularly from the Global South, will be built by ‘insiders’ who truly understand their markets,” Truhina says. “UTOPIA exists to give those insiders the tools they need to turn deep expertise into category-defining companies.”

One defining feature of the enterprise’s model is the UTOPIA Studio, which focuses on backing domain experts and specialists, many of whom may not be entrepreneurs, in an effort to solve deeper problems and develop more proprietary intellectual property (IP). Rather than betting on pitch decks alone, the Studio invests in specialists, supporting them with product development, growth, operations, and expansion, as well as its AI-native tech and compute stack. In this way, it supports both technology development and venture building, while also cultivating a new generation of entrepreneurs.

“At UTOPIA, we deliberately back deep-domain experts rather than generalist founders, i.e. operators, scientists, and engineers, who have lived the problems they’re solving, and therefore understand them at a depth the market often misses,” Truhina explains. This, she notes, is key in an ecosystem that is today dominated by AI-powered enterprises that make it easier for startups to launch, but more difficult to stand apart. “AI has fundamentally changed venture creation,” she points out. “It has commoditized many parts of startup design, making it easier than ever to launch a company, but much harder to build one that is truly differentiated. As a result, we’re seeing an explosion of AI-built ventures optimized for speed and surface-level traction, rather than for durable intellectual property, defensibility, or long-term value.”

“This is where domain experts make the difference,” Truhina goes on. “These founders know things outsiders often don’t—how systems work, where regulations are a bottleneck, and where customers are already willing to pay. In the Global South specifically, the most valuable opportunities sit inside complex systems that outsiders struggle to navigate. Founders who’ve operated inside those systems reduce risk, validate faster, and build companies that are harder to replicate.” And by removing the barriers that often prevent deep domain experts from becoming founders, particularly aspects such as commercialization, technical execution, fundraising, and go-to-market complexity, the UTOPIA Studio allows these innovators to focus on solving core problems rather than managing startup logistics.

The UTOPIA team.

The UTOPIA Studio thus structures its venture-building efforts around what it calls Problem-Oriented Deep Dives (PODs). “These are tightly scoped strategic focus areas, such as infrastructure intelligence or industrial decarbonization, where we know insider pain is clear, and AI allows us to do what simply was not possible five years ago,” Truhina explains. “The idea is partners, co-investors, and the UTOPIA Studio team all plug into a POD, and help compound value,” she says. By deploying capital early and decisively within these PODs, UTOPIA Studio enables founders to focus on execution rather than continuous fundraising. In short, it helps them shortcut the growing pains typical of early-stage startups by supporting them until they gain traction.

Complementing the UTOPIA Studio’s activities, A-typical Ventures—the first international venture capital fund supported by Qatar Investment Authority’s Fund of Funds program—was built to address a clear gap in the Middle East: early-stage capital that supports founders from idea to institutional scale. “In practical terms, ‘A-typical’ means three The UTOPIA team things,” Truhina explains. “Firstly, stage focus. We invest very early—from pre-seed through Series A—including companies that are still at the minimum viable product stage. Our check sizes range from US$100,000 to $800,000, and we continue supporting companies as they grow. Early-stage investing requires a fundamentally different approach to sourcing, diligence, and founder support than Series A+ capital, and that’s where we specialize.”

“Secondly, how we choose what to invest in,” Truhina continues. “Instead of being either sector-agnostic or narrowly sector-focused, we invest through our PODs. We start with specific, high-impact challenges that are often overlooked because they’re difficult, and we align capital, operating expertise, and regional networks around these complex, high-conviction problem spaces. Thirdly, how we support founders: beyond capital, founders gain access to the UTOPIA Studio’s expertise and hands-on scaling support. This is particularly important in emerging markets, where founders often need more than just capital to scale regionally.”

Taken together, UTOPIA’s model across all of its platforms is designed to support founders as they build companies that can add meaningful value in their respective markets. “What fundamentally sets us apart is that we don’t just finance startups: we design, cobuild, and scale them as a system,” Truhina says. And it is that systems-level thinking that shapes how UTOPIA approaches risk, patience, and value creation in frontier and emerging markets, accounting for the structural risks while building for speed and execution. “Real value creation comes from knowing which risks matter, and which ones are simply noise,” she adds. That is also the outlook that shapes how UTOPIA operates today—as Truhina put it: “We are patient where it matters—on infrastructure, talent, and ecosystem development—and decisive where it is critical—on execution, founder support, and capital deployment.”

This outlook is also shaped by Truhina’s outlook on how AI—which is playing an increasingly important role in accelerating time to market, and in some cases, fundraising for startups—can and should be deployed, with her stressing depth over velocity alone. “At UTOPIA, we don’t reject speed,” she declares. “But we do redefine it. We believe the real advantage is compounded speed: moving quickly on the right problems, with strong foundations in place.” Plus, when looking forward to what UTOPIA’s success will ultimately look like, Truhina points to three outcomes: stronger capital, talent, and IP flows between the Middle East, Asia, and Africa; deeper industry engagement that goes beyond passive investing; and the continued development of UTOPIA OS, the platform’s AI-native operating infrastructure. “By subsidizing this layer, we materially lower the cost of innovation— making UTOPIA one of the most attractive platforms globally for pre-seed and early-stage founders building AI-driven ventures,” she says.

For Truhina, the end goal is clear. “If, in five years, founders in emerging markets see venture capital as a true partner in building faster, cheaper, and more globally competitive companies, then we will have succeeded.”

Support At Scale

Alina Truhina on the role of institutional partnerships in UTOPIA’s venture-building model.

What role does Qatar’s evolving innovation ecosystem play in shaping UTOPIA and the kinds of ventures it supports? Also, how does having partners like Qatar Development Bank for the UTOPIA Studio and Qatar Investment Authority for A-typical Ventures help UTOPIA work toward its overall goals?

“Qatar’s innovation ecosystem is evolving quickly, and we see ourselves as actively helping to shape that evolution, rather than simply operating within it.

Today, one of the key challenges in Qatar is not capital availability at the top end, but early-stage depth and continuity. While Qatar’s total venture deal volume is growing, early-stage investments account for less than half of the total number. This gap is exactly where UTOPIA plays a catalytic role.

Through the UTOPIA Studio, we build new companies from the ground up, working with founders at the idea and minimum viable product stage to solve problems relevant to the region but globally scalable. This strengthens early-stage deal flow and attracts high-quality founders and intellectual property into Qatar.

Strategic partners are critical to making this model work at scale. Qatar Development Bank supports the UTOPIA Studio by bringing institutional credibility, ecosystems' access, and pathways for pilots and commercialization. Qatar Investment Authority, through its Fund of Funds program supporting A-typical Ventures, plays a pivotal role in enabling risk-taking at the earliest stages, where private capital alone is often insufficient, but impact and long-term value creation are highest.

Together, these partnerships help us deliver strong portfolio performance, contribute to a sustainable venture ecosystem in Qatar and the Middle East, and strengthen the Middle East and other emerging regions.”

Pictured in the lead image is Alina Truhina, Founding Partner of UTOPIA. All images courtesy of UTOPIA.

This article first appeared in Inc. Arabia's Special Edition for Web Summit Qatar in February 2026. To read the full issue online, click here.