FWDstart Podcast
Episode: Alina Truhina, Managing Partner at Atypical Ventures


[INTRO TEASER]

Alina Truhina: The biggest misconception is that you can copy and paste what exists in the West and apply it to the South. We believe that two-twenty doesn't work in emerging markets. I see a world where solo founders are building companies to billion dollar valuations without needing a team, without needing a technical co-founder, without needing VC money. Founders should not listen to investors—they should listen to their customers. Unfortunately, VC has developed this reputation for putting investors on a pedestal, and actually it's the founders who should be celebrated and supported more. We are literally creating markets here. That is legacy and that is purpose.


[HOST INTRODUCTION]

Jamie: So today's guest is Alina Truhina. She's a managing partner at Atypical Ventures, a new VC firm with backing from the Qatar Investment Authority, located in Doha in Qatar. Now, this is a fantastic episode and I'm really, really looking forward to bringing it to you.

So Atypical invests at the very earliest stages, all the way from pre-seed up to Series A, with a focus on the Middle East, encompassing the GCC, Levant, Pakistan, and Turkey. Now, the real reason that I wanted to have Alina on the podcast today is her wealth of experience investing across a wide array of emerging markets.

So over the course of the last decade, she's invested in 80-plus companies across South Asia, Africa, Southeast Asia, and now the Middle East as well. We look at why a Western VC model doesn't map neatly into an emerging market context. We touch on why they've decided to establish an HQ in Doha instead of maybe more established regional tech hubs like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Riyadh. What makes a good founder, but also a question which we haven't actually tackled with any sufficiency to date: what makes a good investor?

So incredibly thankful to Alina for taking the time to hop on the pod. She was also in Abu Dhabi to record, which was a rare treat not to have to travel up to Sheikh Zayed Road. So an extra thanks to her for making my journey and commute that bit much shorter.

For this particular episode, I also just wanted to take this opportunity to talk to you, the listener or watcher. Thank you very much for the support over the course of the last number of episodes. I'm cognisant of the fact that I haven't actually spoken to you directly to date. The support and feedback has been phenomenal—really enjoying putting this together. We have a massive pipeline of episodes to come with some really, really terrific guests. So I'm really excited to bring that to you.

If you are enjoying, please share with a friend. It would help enormously—share it with a colleague, share it with family members, whoever. Entirely agnostic as far as who you share it with, we don't mind. And also, please drop a like, drop a follow, drop a subscribe, whatever it is that you want to drop which is constructive—that would be most, most helpful. So look, without further ado, let's get into the episode. But thank you. It really, really does mean a lot and we're looking forward to bringing you more interesting in-depth episodes on a consistent basis throughout the course of 2026.


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[INTERVIEW BEGINS]

Jamie: Alina, thank you so much for joining me today.

Alina: Thank you for having me.

Jamie: And you've made the trip to Abu Dhabi as well, which is a rarity. As I was telling you off camera here, generally I have to go up to Sheikh Zayed Road. So thank you for especially flying in just for this, which is exactly what you did, no doubt.

Alina: Yes, it was a whole 45-minute flight.

Jamie: So I enormously appreciate it. Can we start off actually maybe with—I was trying to figure out the best way of describing this, because you wear many hats, but I feel like you actually work for many companies. I don't know what the best way of framing it is. So we have obviously Atypical Ventures in Qatar. Can you describe—this all falls under the umbrella of Utopia, correct? Can you clarify everything that's going on here?

Alina: Clarify all my different hats. Yes, and you're absolutely right—the different hats do converge. So let me give you some context. Utopia Capital Management is basically a platform of both VC funds and, most recently, a studio which we recently announced.

Jamie: I saw this—this is only like two days ago. Isn't this incredibly exciting?

Alina: Yes, that's really cool. We revealed it at the Mobile World Congress in Doha, which was the first MWC in Doha, 2025. And I think they're coming back next year, which is exciting.

Jamie: Good.

Alina: So basically, we are a platform of VC funds and the studio, and the idea is that we converge funding capital, local intelligence—which means we are all on the ground in our respective markets—as well as now AI-native infrastructure and technology. And so those three things combined give rise to all the different entities within our structure. But all of that is integrated under one umbrella, under Utopia.

So to your point, we have Utopia as the mothership, the platform. We have Atypical Ventures, which is the Middle East plus Turkey and Pakistan fund—so it's a Middle East-plus fund. And we have the Radical Fund, which is a Southeast Asia fund investing in climate-focused companies. And then as I mentioned, we have the Utopia Studio, which is both building new companies that are AI-native as well as re-engineering existing early-stage companies that the funds are investing in to basically scale them to growth.

Jamie: Broad geographic focus. Why?

Alina: Actually, not many people know this, but my partner and I have always been passionate about and always wanted to only work in emerging markets or emerging and frontier markets. And 10 years ago when we first met, when we first started working together, we actually wanted to raise an emerging markets fund—a fund covering the global south. But we realised that actually you can't do that.

Jamie: So many things are about timing.

Alina: Exactly. This was back in 2015, 2016. And so we realised we actually need to put in a lot more work and invest in these respective regions. But it's always been a part of our philosophy and part of our mandate. In fact, Utopia's vision is essentially a world where innovation is actually accessible to all. So much of it is us thinking about Silicon Valley and the West—Europe, UK—leading the charge when it comes to VC. But actually, the global south has incredible talent, incredible potential, and as we know, is rising to build these ecosystems of startup economies.

So for us, it's always been about the global south, or it's always been about the emerging venture markets. And it's what we find exciting. So yes, we've spent a lot of time in Africa, then we've spent a lot of time in Africa and South Asia, actually, which is where we started, then Southeast Asia, and then of course the Middle East was a natural progression forward.

Jamie: What drew you towards those particular emerging venture markets? Because you're not from Africa, you're not from the Middle East, you're not from Southeast Asia. So where does that stem from?

Alina: It's a great question. And I would go back to, for me personally, it is the excitement of building something new. Many people ask me, why Doha? Why not Dubai? Why not Abu Dhabi? There's something special about being at the forefront and influencing change. If I look at the West, and to your point, both my partner and I could have had probably safe and secure jobs working in those countries. But rather than making something better or easier or more convenient, rather than investing in things that are addressing problems—we are literally creating markets here. And that is legacy and that is purpose, and that is intentionality. So I wouldn't trade it and I wouldn't do it any other way.

Jamie: Did you have that interest from when you were younger? I feel like I spoke to someone recently who said they were like a Lonely Planet sort of child and they really enjoyed that. Is that something that you resonate with as well?

Alina: Yeah, I think there's something to it. I do come from, let's call it, humble beginnings. And I was born in Europe during the Soviet Union. And our family has seen a lot of disruption to our lives. And I'm very privileged that I have had the opportunity to move to safer countries. So we moved to Australia as refugees, as political refugees.

So I think you're absolutely right. I think that spark or that emotional drive does come from two things. One is wanting others to have the same opportunity that I had in terms of access to capital, access to market, access to network. And also showing through my work that there's incredible people in the markets that we work in and invest in. And those people are as good, if not better, than people who are born in places that have more resources, more infrastructure.

Jamie: You could take a step back and go, okay—Africa, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, climate investing—they seem quite what's in vogue at a given moment in time. What would your answer to that be?

Alina: Every time we've evolved our model, we've evolved our model. Going back to when we first started working together, our first vehicle, if you could call it that, was an impact-focused vehicle. And we didn't invest through equity—we actually provided grants and worked with governments, specifically with a gender-focused lens thesis. This is all the way back 10 years ago. And we've evolved since then. And we've looked at different types of corporate-led innovation and models. We looked at and built operator-type investment vehicles, blended finance vehicles, and then of course traditional VC funds and studios.

And so the thread, or the pattern, if you like, is that we believe that every region, every market in that region, in that specific timeframe, requires a very tailored approach to investing. So what we did in South Asia or Africa or Southeast Asia will not work in the Middle East—which is why we are where we are now, in a consolidated, integrated model of both funds and a studio.

But not many people think about it that way because of course it's easier or it's more standard, more acceptable to do a fund or to do an accelerator or to do something else. We really believe in evolution. And when we started our work, and before we even started our work, before we raised the fund in Southeast Asia, we looked at the region and we saw incredible funds that have been deploying and investing for a long, long time—mainly generalist funds, mainly those focused on FinTech, e-commerce. And we looked at the intersection of where we can see the potential for greatest returns and exits in the space as well as the greatest opportunity. And so climate became our thesis because of that.

More than that, it wasn't just climate as decarbonisation. We saw a niche because not many funds—if any, and still to this day not many at all—are targeting climate adaptation. So we actually said we will invest in both mitigation and adaptation for a more integrated investment thesis as such. So every time we've come to a region, we've taken the approach of what works, what will work, again, to deliver the biggest ROI and ecosystem impact. And we did the same thing in the Middle East.

Jamie: Can we actually stick on climate? I'm moving around slightly from the structure, but can you actually maybe just provide that distinction between adaptation and mitigation?

Alina: Yeah, of course. So most of the world, in simple terms, is looking at how do we decarbonise, how do we take carbon dioxide out of our system. Whereas adaptation—the thesis behind it is to say, actually, unfortunately, we are already going beyond the 1.5 degrees. And unfortunately, we are already witnessing, here where we are today, and definitely in countries like the Philippines, like Thailand, we are witnessing disasters. We're witnessing unprecedented change. And we need to adapt to that change. And so we need to look at innovations that allow us as humans, but also the entire planet, to be able to do that.

Unfortunately, most of the rhetoric in the last, let's say, decade has really focused or has really said that adaptation is the work of governments—because it's large scale, it's infrastructure related, it's physical. And so it hasn't been so prevalent in the VC industry, again, for many reasons which we can talk about. But it is absolutely needed. We absolutely need to invest in adaptation technologies and adaptation—again, both hardware, software type companies—in order to see the progress towards climate action.

Jamie: So when you're looking at Southeast Asia, then you identify climate as something—how do you actually go about establishing the fund on the ground? What does that look like in practice?

Alina: First of all, you come to Thailand, okay? And you spend time in Bangkok. In all seriousness, you have to spend time in the market. So I lived in Bangkok and of course travelled across the region whilst living there for a very long time. So I think that's the first thing. Like the Middle East, Southeast Asia is very much built on trust and relationships. But also, in order to really understand the type of innovations or solutions in need in the market, you really need to spend time with people. You need to understand the consumer, the demographics of that market, not just by reading a report—you need to be there.

And then you build an incredible team. And I'm really proud—I had all of the Southeast Asia team with me in Doha last week.

Jamie: Oh, wonderful.

Alina: So all of them are coming again because there's this natural one team under Utopia—we actually not just transfer knowledge asynchronously, but actually come and visit our respective markets. So they were here in Qatar, not in Abu Dhabi. And the team are all local. So I've got people in Indonesia and Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand. And all we do is spend time in market.

Jamie: And how has it been going? Because climate has become something of a dirty word in certain circles.

Alina: In certain circles. Look, it is unfortunate. I'm not going to say that the industry hasn't been impacted. And actually, maybe just to take a step back, we think of climate not as a select sector. We think of it as actually a cross-cutting intersect.

Jamie: Exactly.

Alina: So what that means, and for us—meaning what is climate, again coming back to mitigation, adaptation—it is a spectrum. So it's everything from energy and renewables to built environment to nature-based solutions, food and agriculture. And then on the adaptation side, it's much more around disasters, management and prevention. It definitely is about healthcare, water tech, et cetera. If you look at it that way, actually, and you can segment climate with those, you have different data and energy and renewables that have been increasing rather than decreasing.

Jamie: Because there is this tendency to pigeonhole, isn't there? Like, you have this idea in your mind of what it is. Because I remember speaking to Mark Kahn from Omnivore—

Alina: Exactly.

Jamie: —a climate tech fund with a focus on agriculture. That's how they frame things.

Alina: And I think it's something that—Mark's a good friend. British. So is Sonya from Venture Oak, who's a huge climate advocate. I think us as climate GPs, if you like, we need to get our job done, which is: how do we get the money flowing to the places where we want them to flow to and to the people and solutions—i.e. climate solutions—that we want them to. Sometimes it does take, of course, education and unpacking. There's a lot of semantics, there's a lot of acronyms. There's a lot of FOAK—

Jamie: Yes.

Alina: —that people don't understand. For those who don't know, FOAK means first-of-a-kind technologies—which is absolutely fair. When talking to prospective LPs or existing ones, it is about a journey of educating them on what matters. And so to answer your question, I don't think climate tech investing was a bubble or that it has—certainly, the capital has shifted, but I think we're just scratching the surface.

I think we're beginning, and by we, the investment community globally, we're beginning to understand what type of capital is needed, where. There's a lot of dialogue around capital stack for climate, looking at equity and debt and R&D and revenue financing mechanisms. Because in reality, climate tech is not like FinTech and e-commerce for many different reasons. And again, we as investors need to be adaptive to those realities to make sure that we are funding the right solutions that are disrupting and addressing the climate crisis, bluntly.

Jamie: Does a 10-year time horizon make sense?

Alina: It does for some companies; of course, it doesn't for others. Again, I think it would be a generalising kind of answer to say yes or no. We have invested, for example, in companies that are much more software-enabled rather than hardware. And we've invested in companies and countries where the regulatory environment, quite frankly, is much more amenable to and much more favourable to, again, let's say climate solutions. And therefore the speed of change and the type of funding available is obviously different to others where things are a little bit more nascent.

All of these things help. But yes, if you're looking at it overall and understanding what it takes to build a climate company that has a lot of physical aspects, that requires a lot more patience in order to get the right regulatory approvals—yes, there will be some companies that take longer time to commercialise, maybe even longer time to get to market, right, if it's a kind of new biotech type of innovation. But not all of them.

Jamie: I've gone off on a massive tangent there. We didn't even get—maybe we'll talk about it in a MENA context. I think maybe it would be helpful. So what opportunities do you see specifically, maybe regionally, as it pertains to the climate tech side of things? Because I'm speaking to actually Tal from 44.01 next week, for example, and they're doing some interesting stuff on the carbon capture and mineralisation side of things, which obviously is so pilot-led and there's obviously a long time horizon involved there. Where do you see the greatest opportunity regionally as it relates to climate?

Alina: Yeah, maybe let me take a slight step back, just to give some context as to how we see and how we invest here. So Atypical is actually sector-agnostic. So climate is one of the spaces we look at. But actually what we've done over the last sort of 12 months is really understand what does it take to build a category-defining company of the next generation.

Jamie: Big question. Small undertaking.

Alina: What does it mean? And what we've done is very simple. We've looked at the type of technologies that are available. Obviously AI springs to mind—and for us, AI is technology. It is not a sector. It is the rails and the infrastructure with which you get to scale. And we looked at, again, in our true manner, where is VC going? And with that in mind, where are the different markets going, and what type of founders are we seeing getting to success?

And we came up with three sort of very simple hypotheses. Being a VC and being maybe a little bit contrarian, we really think that VC is going to evolve to the point where the way we currently fund and invest in companies is going to be completely different. I think we're already seeing the effects of that.

Jamie: Let me unpack that, please.

Alina: It's no surprise to people—AI is obviously changing a lot of things. And the speed at which companies are developing MVPs and prototypes and getting to market and validating their users has significantly shifted. And for us, we spend all of our time with early-stage companies, so it's idea stage to Series A. So what does that mean? It means that the cycles and the type of engagement that ventures or founders need to get through to build a scalable company is going to be completely different. And we need to adjust to that as VCs.

So I see a world in which—and this is already happening in the West—where you're getting solo founders building companies much, much faster to billion-dollar valuations, without needing a team, without needing a technical co-founder, without needing VC money. So if that's our potential, what does it mean for our regions? Well, I think we can get there. And so through the studio and through our funds, what we envisage is a world in which our studio is actually building these AI-native companies and we are getting founders from idea to Series A in less than 24 months—which means go to market first, customers first, first dollar. And the funds are investing in those companies. So you are disrupting the way, let's say, bridge rounds work, the way valuations would hopefully also adjust.

And within that, we said, what excites us? And we've developed an approach which we are calling problem-orientated deep dives, or PODs for short.

Jamie: I saw this—it was on the website. I was like, oh, okay.

Alina: Yeah. And because we know we need to look for high-value, high-complexity problems that will be sticky and that will deliver incredible returns—because that's where technology, especially if you apply AI to it, can optimise and accelerate the innovation in those spaces. So it's your unsexy, boring places. And therefore partnering to co-build with founders that understand those spaces really well. So rather than looking for an entrepreneur coming out of university going, 'Yay, I want to be an entrepreneur, isn't it great?'—really looking for those experts, those domain specialists that have spent time, have built networks, really understand the customer pain points really, really well. And we provide the technology, we provide the access to market, we provide the team and support that they need. So it's in that partnership that we release the opportunity.

So now to answer your question: what are these PODs? So PODs are basically your thesis-focused clusters, or opportunity clusters, where we think we can compound IP with talent, domain experts, and capital, to actually build those category-defining, category-disruptive companies of the future. And so we've identified—we will work in cycles—we've identified our first PODs.

Jamie: Go on, do tell. Drum roll.

Alina: So let me give you a few. One is in infrastructure intelligence. So we're really obsessively looking at things like data centre optimisation, grid optimisation, things like maintenance and infrastructure. There's a lot—and that's very closely tied to obviously energy consumption. We are looking at sovereign systems, cybersecurity, government intelligence, kind of data layers there. We are looking absolutely at decarbonisation opportunities as well. And that's both cross-border logistics, maritime. And then of course, built environment and consumer-led type innovations.

And then of course things like health and health tech, and within that, looking a lot at women's health and aged care. But also, last but not least, across the FinTech layer of what we're calling the flow rails—the infrastructure that's needed under those complex problems. And that includes things like remittances, SME financing, wealth preservation and creation. But also things like tokenisation as well. So those are things that are exciting.

Jamie: It all makes sense to me. There's nothing that I can push back on. I'm like, yeah, okay, good, good. You're first to be validated. I validated in real time. That's all I needed—was my seal of approval. Anything other than that is entirely superfluous.

Can I ask then—how collaborative is the process? Say you found a founder, is it that you're matching a founder to a solution? Is it collaborative in terms of coming up with what that's going to look like? Maybe even just break down the studio model in its entirety—that would probably be helpful.

Alina: Really. Yeah, absolutely. Again, great evolution there because we looked at different—first of all, we looked at what we've done in the past. And then we looked at all the different other studios that we know of, and there's a lot of great work going on there. And so the way we're approaching this AI-native studio is twofold.

So there's an element of co-building and partnering with the domain expert. Now the way—and you might ask, how do you find these guys and girls?

Jamie: You've read my mind.

Alina: Good. We've taken the stance that a lot of the time funds and studios and investment professionals go out and market the entity itself, which is natural. And you need to do that because founders need to find you. But this time we've taken a different approach. We've said actually founders care about the problem. They don't care that we're Utopia or Atypical or the studio. It's cool, it's great, and we think it's cool. But actually they really care about the problem that they're in.

And if you're really looking at somebody who is an engineer on an oil rig who's spent the last 15 years obsessively trying to change things, but doesn't—may not necessarily know that they're an entrepreneur or may not even think about venturing into the space again—they care about the problem and the space and the customers. And so our thesis is actually, let's put out all of our thinking, all of our research, all of the insights and data points around these specific clusters. Let's just literally put it out there, and you can find it already online—where our first clusters went live yesterday, I believe—and let's see who else is excited about it. And the thesis is that people who are and want to build in those sectors, in those problem clusters—that's how we'll connect. So obviously there's a bit of outbound and inbound, but the attention is spent much more on the problem than on anything else.

Jamie: I was going to say, practically, you'd want your SEO to be very good in that instance from a discovery perspective.

Alina: And that, but also we've spent time as a team rethinking the whole—you and I spoke about events. Traditionally, VCs kind of hold events, and again, it's needed for many different reasons. But how do we actually penetrate and engage communities where VCs are not even understood or known?

Jamie: To your point, the engineer on an oil rig—it's very unlike—how is he going to come into contact? It's such a sourcing and discovery problem.

Alina: Precisely. So how do we meet them where they are? So how do we go into hospitals and talk to doctors. In fact, one of our first EIRs that we're already working with is a medical doctor. And so I think it is about thinking differently and creatively about how—again, how VCs, and for us specifically, how we find these domain experts. That doesn't necessarily mean the traditional VC sourcing tactics of events and whatnot.

So that's how we find them. But basically after that, it is a very tailored kind of experience. It very much depends on the entrepreneur. And some may already have a concept in mind. But the idea is most of them will be coming in for us to co-build the concept with. And so over time, we are building 140 concepts roughly over the next five years.

Jamie: Wow.

Alina: Not all of them will be viable, obviously—understood, traditional power law, VC economics. But we will be spinning out those that have the potential and have shown the right kind of traction, where again, the funds will be investing in them to take them to Series A onwards. But it's a very co-building approach without any kind of programmatic or standardised manner.

Jamie: Do you have a bias in terms of the particular qualities or characteristics that you look for in founders? You've described their obvious domain expertise, which helps. But aside from that then, is there anything in particular that stands out or that you've learned from experiences in other emerging venture markets?

Alina: Yeah, it's a great question. I think two things. There's definitely something to be said about grit and resilience—and those two words I'm sure come up a lot.

Jamie: You would not believe—this is every episode of a podcast so far has been those words. Grit, resilience.

Alina: Honestly, there's a book called Grit. I don't know if you've read it.

Jamie: No, I have not.

Alina: It's a really great book. Because I think, from, again, for many different reasons—but even just reflecting on what it takes to be an entrepreneur, you go through a lot of challenges. To say the least. And so, especially in markets that we work in, some of those challenges compromise your ability to make—or rather, put you in a position where you have to make decisions vis-à-vis your family, definitely your lifestyle. Without it, I think you have to be a little bit crazy in order to keep going.

Other than those two things: humbleness and curiosity to learning. And openness to learning. And I know that sounds obvious, but just reflecting on the way some entrepreneurs respond to challenges says actually much more about the entrepreneur's potential and ability to then lead and build something. Than in other contexts where there might be incredibly technically astute, incredibly skilled, have a great deal of IP that they're bringing to the table. There's a reason why VCs will always tell you that they invest in founders, not the ventures. So if you have a great business, a great venture, great concept, great timing, great market—but a bad entrepreneur—you're not going to build a great company.

Jamie: And can I ask about the inverse of that then? If you have an exceptional founder, you may overindex on that versus the market in which they're building. Has that ever happened?

Alina: Yeah, but they pivot. They figure it out, again, they pivot. And in our stages, pivots are a must, almost.

Jamie: Precisely. It's unlikely it's going to be linear.

Alina: Exactly. So again, you're looking for those traits because you already know that the company that you're meeting today at pre-seed is not going to be the same company at Series A. Again, those kind of traits, personality traits and behaviours are signals of what will be happening when the company will hit a point where they will need to make a change to the business model or go back to square one. And those founders that don't have it, that don't have what it takes, can't do it.

Jamie: In terms of the founders that you do pass on then as well, do they have any particular trait in common, would you say? Because invariably you're probably passing on 99% of the founders on one level that you come into contact with. Is there anything that stands out that's maybe a particular red flag or anything that you've just noticed over time?

Alina: It's an art and science, isn't it? One of the things, to your point—I was just reflecting—as we again constantly tweak our sourcing and investment process to again be better and to be more founder-friendly, but also be better at identifying opportunities earlier.

Jamie: And if we go back to maybe Qatar specifically—obviously it's a small market, all things considered. So where are the founders coming from then? So you mentioned that it's a broad geographic scope or aperture whereby we've got Turkey, Pakistan, and also the broader region. The founders need to relocate to Qatar, or how is this working?

Alina: Yeah, great question. So first of all, part of the reason—at the end of the day, we are venture capitalists and we're investors and we're builders of scalable companies. And so we always need to look at how do we have a large enough diversity in the portfolio—and that includes all the aspects such as geography—in order to build a de-risked portfolio of companies and invest in them. And so hence the strategic arbitrage between certain markets that have more mature ecosystems but less capital availability, or those ecosystems where compute power is much more available than in others. All these things come into mind. So that's the de-risk and the diversity piece.

In terms of Qatar specifically, Qatar is our home. It is our HQ. We have purposefully, as I said in the last sort of 12 months, integrated all of our entities for the fund manager to be based in Qatar. And we look forward to being in Doha for a very long time to come.

Two things. Qatar is growing rapidly in terms of the startup economy. If you look at the last 24 months and you compare to where we are now, significant strides have been made. And that is thanks to a lot of the state-led initiatives, not least Qatar Investment Authority's billion-dollar fund of funds, of which we're the first international VC to get that backing, which we're really proud of. There's many other fund managers, of course, that are already here and coming in. But it's also thanks to other programmatic activities that are coming out of other institutions and a growing private sector.

For us, Qatar makes sense because of this very special convergence of creativity—because it's a very creative, cultural place—talent, the fact that it is attracting a lot of global expertise, of course infrastructure, and capital. And for me, it resembles some of those innovation hubs like Singapore, for example, that have done incredibly well in establishing themselves as that innovation and investment hub of the region.

Jamie: How does the relationship with QIA come about then?

Alina: We've been working closely—so actually, it's a good question. One of the things we always do is we look for a partner on the ground. We've done this in every single region. In Southeast Asia, we have an amazing partner, a family office who is our anchor, who's based out of Thailand, Bangkok. And so that helped us establish ourselves there.

So we've been working with QIA for the last sort of over two years. Of course, even before the fund was officially announced in February of this year. And they've just been an incredible hands-on partner. Again, I think we have different types of LPs and different types of approaches, and different LPs engage with GPs in different ways. And they've been incredibly supportive to the point where we've just, last week—I'm sorry you missed out—we co-launched Qatar's first VC association earlier this year.

Jamie: I saw this, I saw this. My invite must have got lost in the post. It's fine. I'm fine.

Alina: I'm sorry. It is on the way. There will be many more to come.

Jamie: Okay, there will be very good.

Alina: So we launched it officially during Qatar Economic Forum in May this year. And then last week, QIA and QVCA co-hosted an event for the regional and local ecosystem. Again, spearheading and highlighting the work that's been going on over the last 12 to 24 months and what's coming. There is a lot of work to be done. But they're absolutely at the epicentre of making sure that happens.

Jamie: How did you pitch Atypical? What was the most compelling?

Alina: You'll have to ask them.

Jamie: This is true. I'll be asking the correct person.

Alina: I would, but I could. Look, I'll tell you what the feedback that we get generally from LPs, in the sense that I think it is a combination of the fact that we are a differentiated model. That it's not just a vanilla two-and-twenty VC. Why? Because we understand what it takes to build and invest in companies in those markets, as we've described. The combining aspect of needing a team and a technical team that supports and de-risks the portfolio, combined with the fact that we are local.

So again, having people in Southeast Asia on the ground, me spending my time and my partner in the markets—we are not sitting in a New York office, dialling in from time to time. We're not flying in and flying out, in that respect. And we really, truly believe in that local, boots-on-the-ground methodology and approach. Because most LPs don't have that access. So for them it's important and they see this as a critical element to not just sourcing the best founders, but then supporting them to the next stage. And to obviously facilitating the kind of performance that we look for.

And team, I think the team speaks for itself. The combination of all the different skill sets, both in terms of track record of investments, but also in terms of understanding the emerging markets that we work in, which is quite novel.

Jamie: I was going to ask about this from a hiring perspective—we don't often speak about that from the VC side of things. It's always just exclusively from a startup side. So obviously something you mentioned there is the sort of deep domain expertise and operational expertise—especially important from a venture studio perspective. How do you actually go about hiring a team for that?

Alina: First of all, we are hiring.

Jamie: Oh, great. Thanks, Jamie. You're welcome.

Alina: So we are hiring. We're about 15 people at the moment under the whole Utopia platform across the board, and we are hiring for the studio. So a lot of the roles that we're looking for at the moment are those kind of very specialised and specific around product, around design, around of course AI technologies.

Couple of things. I think what we look for is—and in a way, as you said, this is kind of similar to the types of things we look for in founders—but we look for deep experience in a specific domain, whether that is investment or whether that is product or engineering or whatnot. But then we look for transferable skills as well. And it's funny, we did this exercise last week with the entire team—where all 15 of us come from different countries. We do not have one person coming from the same country. That diversity is, I think, paramount in all the work that we do. And that diversity also lends itself to different types of cultural experiences, different types of professional experiences. So that kind of transferable—many would call it soft skills—is incredibly important. Why? Because culture and collaboration builds the best companies. And at the end of the day, that's what we are. We are building a platform, we're building as a team—we need to do the best that we can do in order to invest in the best that we can find.

Jamie: And to your point there about diversity, I suppose that extends somewhat to the geographical disbursement in terms of scope as well. I'm keen to maybe get an understanding—what transfers? What have you seen in Bangkok that transfers over to, I don't know, a Doha context, or from Lagos? Is there anything in particular?

Alina: It's a great question. Many things. And actually from a very, very much—actually purely from a kind of venture startup perspective—one thing that we've noticed over and over again is that sometimes for a startup to expand to a new market is much more valuable and appropriate, strategically opportunistic, to go to a market that's outside of their respective region. And we're starting to see that, and we're actually doubling down on that within our platform.

Jamie: That's interesting.

Alina: So we are now actually having portfolio companies expanding from Southeast Asia to the Middle East, Middle East to Southeast Asia. With time, as we go on and launch in other geographies, we'll continue to do that—because of these changes that I was referring to earlier, the strategic arbitrage that happens between the talent availability, again, infrastructure availability, capital, government infrastructure and government support. You're seeing these elements, plus then you layer on the impact of demographics and consumer behaviour. And yeah, it becomes much more viable and important for a company to come from Singapore to go to Qatar or to UAE or to Jordan, or to Mexico, right? Than it is to go from Singapore to Vietnam, for example.

Jamie: It could be advantageous from an exit perspective at some point as well down the road. Like historically, you've looked westward and you've looked at the Nasdaq maybe. But obviously, I suppose with the development of Tadawul and ADX in particular and the breadth of companies queuing up to go public there, maybe that makes sense. Maybe saw that with Sary and Shopup combining as well from a Bangladeshi perspective and how that maybe ties in there. Maybe Southeast Asia, something similar maybe.

Alina: Yeah, absolutely. We are seeing a lot of interesting companies from Malaysia, Indonesia when it comes to sharia-compliant financing being built that are very much applicable to this part of the world. And again, things shift. Two, three years ago, that corridor did not so much exist. And arguably it's still nascent. So this is where, going back to how we are always excited about building new things, we see ourselves as strengthening that corridor. And we see more and more—again, certainly I can speak for Qatari institutions—Qatar Development Bank was just recently in Singapore. They've done a lot in the country and with the country and strategic partnerships, and that continues. So encouraging and looking for, as you said, the right growth opportunities, the right exit opportunities, is part and parcel of what we need to do as investors.

Jamie: What sector are you most excited about in particular, if you were just—I'm putting you on the spot.

Alina: You're putting me on the spot, but I have a good answer. It's a very personal answer. I really love health tech. Both my parents are doctors.

Jamie: Oh.

Alina: So I grew up in a household of two dentists. In another life, I was actually hoping to become a doctor myself.

Jamie: Same. Luckily, same.

Alina: Really?

Jamie: Yeah. Luckily I did not. I missed out twice. What did you want to be?

Alina: I just wanted to be a general practitioner. That was the ambition.

Jamie: I think the test is actually based on the Australian test. It's called the HPAT in an Irish context. I don't know what it's called in the Australian context. But yeah, I missed out twice.

Alina: Do you regret it?

Jamie: Absolutely not. I would've been a terrible doctor. I'm a terrible podcast host. I don't know. I'm still trying to figure out what I'm going to be when I grow up, unfortunately. Hopefully I figure that out one day. But I don't know, part of me thinks maybe I do regret it to a certain extent. I think maybe there's something about the immediate payoff in terms of having an impact. I think this is something I've discussed with someone recently as it relates to even the investing side of things—it takes so long to see, well, so long if you're good at it or not on one level. Because it's so many years until you might be good at building. But from a purely returns perspective, it's obviously quite a long feedback loop.

Alina: I guess it also depends how you define success and impact, right?

Jamie: This is true.

Alina: And I think maybe that even changes as we get older and realise the most important things in life. But no, you're absolutely right. I think that VC is a long-term game. And again, I think that's partly why having pure financial ambitions is, quite frankly, limiting. I think it's super important. And of course, again, I get the question of 'are you an impact investor' all the time, especially when speaking about climate. And my immediate response is, how can you be an impact-only impact-first investor when you're an investor? Investment itself lends to having a sustainable financial model.

But there's so much exciting changes that we're again witnessing, and we've taken the road of let's be part of the action and let's actually create those changes. Where developing second-time, third-time founders is as important, if not more important, than actually seeing DPI next year.

Jamie: We've discussed traits and qualities in founders. What about investors? What makes a good investor?

Alina: Oh, that's a very good question. I'm going to go back to, again, in our context. Because I wouldn't know, or I could guess, but let me speak for emerging markets. It is absolutely having that experience and on-the-ground experience in the markets that you're investing in.

I speak to some LPs and GPs sometimes, and they kind of ask me, how can you work in these places? There's such exotic places—including Qatar, would you imagine? I wouldn't have thought that people think Qatar is an exotic place, but people don't know it as well yet. And then when I ask them, when was the last time you were in Jakarta? When was the last time you were in Amman? The response sometimes that I get is, 'Oh, I was there as a kid; we were on a family safari holiday' or something. And there's your answer.

Jamie: Not quite the same thing.

Alina: There's your answer. So there is absolutely something to spending time in the markets and with people and building that trust. Because at the end of the day, and we see that in the companies that we back, we cannot invest in companies that are purely SaaS companies. There is a people element, an offline element. And actually those that are more successful are the ones that combine the online and offline—they're able to scale in the global south much faster.

So it's definitely that. It's humility personally. As a woman investor, it comes with all sorts of peculiar challenges and opportunities too. But it is humility. And I always say investors are just as good and are on the same—in the same place as entrepreneurs. I consider myself an entrepreneur. And being humble enough to recognise the privilege of working with incredible people who are putting their lives and families on the line to build innovations for our generation, and recognising that and not being an asshole. Excuse me.

Jamie: You can edit that bit out. Absolutely not—staying in.

Alina: Because unfortunately, VC has developed this reputation for many reasons of putting investors on the pedestal. And actually it's the founders who should be celebrated and supported more. So humility and recognition and appreciation of the responsibility that you have in order to invest in the best so that the whole ecosystem benefits from it.

Jamie: I suppose, look, it's testament to a certain respect. Sometimes we say MENA or we say GCC and we sort of treat it as this homogenous sort of glob, and it's certainly anything but that. It's not monolithic. And it's taking the time to actually understand that, understand the real fabric.

Alina: Absolutely. My favourite thing to do when going to any country, especially if it's a new country, is to go to places where people live. Not to the business sector or centre, but go to where people live, because that's where you'll see the gaps and opportunities. And that's actually how you'll be able to then understand what the entrepreneurs are building and why they're building it. Looking at the informal sector versus a cashless society—very divergent solutions that will be coming out of that. I don't know how you can invest and understand entrepreneurs without understanding it yourself firsthand.

Jamie: Sometimes it's just compulsion to race ahead. Like, I was chatting to Ibrahim—he launched like 11 out of 15 markets for Careem. And he mentioned the first thing that he did before expanding to different country, he would visit the country and he'd try all of the transportation options that were available to him as a citizen of that particular country, to identify where the pain points were, where the pitfalls were—to your point, in terms of from a payment perspective. So I think this idea of expanding purely based on a spreadsheet or what you're reading just doesn't make sense.

Alina: That's why we love early-stage investment as well, because especially because at that point you don't have many data points. And you have to use—of course you have to use logic and really be thorough with ensuring that you review all the management accounts and financial projections. And you have to understand the context, and you actually can make some serious mistakes if you don't—and presumptions and misperceptions. And you really need to use your gut, your intuition, based on the context that you learn. So that's why I think I have the best job in the world, because you're using all your senses in order to make the decisions every day.

Jamie: In terms of investing from Atypical then—is it the preference to come in at the very early stage and then support all the way along? Or is there scope and opportunity for the Series A or a later stage if you haven't quite come in early enough?

Alina: Yeah, so for the moment we do want to come in as early as possible. So part of the integrated model is that the founder gets seamless and fast capital. So we're trying to get to that—remember I was talking about blue sky—from idea to Series A with no bridge rounds. Trying to get to that point and support them, so that, because so much time is spent on fundraising, founders go and spend up to 12 months sometimes getting the round together when they should be out there building, building, building their product and talking to their customers and leading their team. And so we're trying to eliminate that.

So yes, Atypical would be coming in as early as possible with the right, obviously, signals in mind. At the end of the day, there are guardrails, and we want to make sure that we are not just supporting what we build just because they are coming out of the studio. So that's super, super important. That's why even the pro rata rate will be adjusted based on industry standards. And so mechanisms in place for that.

Jamie: That's an interesting point that you flagged there. What happens if—the startup, you don't like what you see at a certain point. It obviously sends such an overwhelming signal to the market, I suppose, on one level. If you no longer want to support it, is that startup then, bluntly, just effectively dead?

Alina: Yeah, I think it's a usual concern in the industry, in the market, to say if you're not following on or if you're just doing pro rata, does that—and I think it did come a little bit from, again, the West with some of the major funds there. I think it's about educating the market again. I think it's not—there may be many reasons why you are not, or one is not, following on. Many reasons, depending on where the fund is in its lifetime, depending on LPs' kind of requests and changes in the strategy, all of which we are witnessing at the moment.

We are really, I feel, right now, really in this very exciting moment of a lot of change. And so I think it is about educating and explaining and sharing transparently what are the reasons. But just because you're not following on doesn't mean it's a bad business because you have multiple funds ongoing.

Jamie: With that focus, how do you preserve that from being spread thin?

Alina: Two things. And you're absolutely right. It's actually interestingly enough, even within climate as we were talking about, there are so many opportunities. You can do a singular sort of fund in energy. But it's actually—what does it take to build that diverse portfolio?

The framework that we are using within the PODs that I was describing earlier is our lens for really deep diving into these specific opportunities. And it means also saying no to others in that specific timeframe. We've slightly shifted away from just generic, anything and everything goes, to actually saying, to your point, where do we believe are the big bets? Again, leveraging that notion of infrastructure, AI, technology, the IP that's coming from the domain experts and the capital that we can provide—where are those disruptive companies going to come from?

And by the way, again, not all companies are going to be utility scale. Of course, not all companies are going to return our fund. But it is about also balancing that with companies that are going to deliver your DPI and be sustainably, efficiently, and financially sustainable. So it is through the POD framework that we will be taking those bets.

Jamie: What's the biggest misconception that people have about emerging markets investing?

Alina: The biggest misconception I've seen is that you can copy and paste what exists in the West and apply it to the South. And I know it sounds generic, but actually it really applies across the board—the economics behind venture funds. We believe that two-twenty doesn't work in emerging markets. We believe that actually you need more than 2% management fee in order to have a team that is able to support the businesses, hence the studio, for example.

Jamie: Interesting. What do LPs think of that?

Alina: Oh, it's amazing conversations all the time. No, but absolutely, it's about, again, building that integrated model. It doesn't mean that you can't have a fund as a fund structure, because at the end of the day, that's an entity. But it does mean that you need to complement it with things like, in our case, the studio where we have 15 people that are full-time experts and able to provide that.

It's about doing that homework and doing that structure—which, again, it's definitely harder than setting up a singular, vanilla fund. But in the end, that is what it takes to work in the markets that we work in. And so again, meeting everybody, all stakeholders where they're at, meeting and understanding the maturity level and the potential of the market. So the biggest misconception is really copying and pasting models of the West and thinking that it's going to be successful here.

Jamie: Can I ask—what was your, what would you say—and this is a different question—what's your, what would you say is your best investment that you've made?

Alina: Oh, my team.

Jamie: Oh, cop out. Not going to let—

Alina: We have a number of really interesting companies that are approaching Series A. Things change. So ask me maybe next year or two years' time.

Jamie: Okay. We'll stick it in the calendar. Have you started deploying from Atypical yet?

Alina: Yes.

Jamie: Cool.

Alina: We have. We're about to announce our third investment. We've announced our first, and we haven't announced our second and third—they're closing as we speak. So my hope is to do that before the holiday break. To end on a high note. And really excited about those three—very different opportunities.

Jamie: What was the first investment? Did I miss this? Metric AI?

Alina: Oh, nevermind—I didn't realise I did. Yes. Our first.

Jamie: Okay. That was interesting. Very good. And the second two?

Alina: Yeah, one is in the data governance space. And the other one is in the corporate wellbeing space. So these are quite diverse. I hope I didn't give away too much.

Jamie: No. I'll try my best after this. I'll scour all of the—I'll bend your ear.

Alina: Please. Please. That would be great.

Jamie: Alina, this was a ton of fun. Thank you very, very much for your time.

Alina: Thank you.

Jamie: Enjoy Abu Dhabi. Thank you for coming.

Alina: Amazing. Look forward to next time.

Jamie: Okay, brilliant. Thanks, Jamie.

Alina: Thank you.


[END OF EPISODE]