Everything a Fellow needs to know

We co-found AI-native companies with domain experts who have lived real inefficiency. The Studio is supported by Qatar Development Bank and sits within the wider Utopia platform — linking venture creation, capital, and regional access across the GCC, Southeast Asia, and Africa.

We are not advisory. Our team ships as co-founders: AI engineers, product builders, designers, and venture operators work next to you from incorporation through first revenue. Capital is part of the package — but the leverage is the build team and the platform.

Modern AI can meaningfully outperform legacy systems in industrial, infrastructure, and services contexts. The GCC, Southeast Asia, and Africa carry deep domain knowledge but underbuilt venture ecosystems. We bridge that gap — turning insider expertise into companies designed to scale globally.

Headquartered in Doha at the QFC, with active programs and partners across the GCC, Southeast Asia, and Africa. Fellows can be based anywhere — see the eligibility section below.

The Fellowship is a structured, individually shaped collaboration between you and The Studio. We move from concept validation to incorporation, paid pilots, and an investable round — with The Studio acting as co-founder and operating partner from day one. Every co-build runs on a null-hypothesis discipline: every assumption about the problem, product, customer, pricing, and go-to-market is tested before it's built on top of.

The Agreement runs for six months from the effective date. The intensive build window is roughly three months of focused work; the remaining time covers validation, incorporation, pilots, and fundraise prep. By Month 2 you are typically incorporated; by Month 5 shipping; by Month 6 raising or ready to launch.

Fellows may keep full-time employment if they declare it up front, allocate enough time to hit milestones, and don't use any employer-owned data, IP, or confidential information. Where relevant, we'll ask you to obtain written acknowledgement from your employer that participation doesn't breach any obligations.

During the term the Fellow works exclusively with The Studio on the concept and won't engage with another venture builder, accelerator, or competing program without prior written consent. This is to protect focus on the concept; we, in turn, won't co-build a materially identical concept with a third party.

The Fellowship is not a full-time in-person residency. Minimum in-person commitment is the kick-off and graduation sprints in Doha, plus one key ecosystem event. Additional time in Doha is encouraged for ecosystem access and partner engagement, but most of the work can be done remotely.

The Studio receives a single allocation of fully-diluted equity in the HoldCo, typically in the range of 4% to 10%, issued at incorporation in exchange for the team, build capacity, and platform we contribute. The exact percentage is a function of stage, scope of support, and the bespoke plan agreed with each Fellow. There is no recurring equity dilution — it is a one-time, in-kind allocation.

Each Fellow receives a USD 7,000 stipend, paid in two instalments: USD 3,500 in the first week, and USD 3,500 on completion of two months of participation. On top of that, a USD 2,000 AI compute and tooling reserve is available on request, and we co-sign your applications for free compute credits from AWS, Google, Microsoft, and NVIDIA — typically tens of thousands of dollars of additional runway.

On graduation, a Studio-affiliated investor may, at its discretion, invest USD 100,000 or more into the HoldCo through a standard SAFE with a USD 1.5M post-money valuation cap and a 20% discount. Eligibility is based on agreed milestones — customer traction, product readiness, and investor-readiness — set jointly at the start of the Fellowship. Follow-on participation in pre-seed and later rounds is also possible.

Through our partnership with Qatar Development Bank, Fellows may be offered subsidised housing in Doha for up to six months, subject to availability and the Fellow's circumstances. This is a non-cash, time-bound benefit, not a guarantee — we'll confirm in writing during onboarding. Workspace access and ecosystem programming are also available alongside it.

Beyond capital and stipend you get direct access to The Studio's product, design, AI, and operating talent — including Prototype Engineers, a Design Lead, Marketing and BD leads, an Ops Lead, and the Funds team. You also get The Studio's tooling, design systems, playbooks, warm investor and partner introductions, and a structured cadence of milestone reviews.

We partner with operators, engineers, scientists, and specialists who know an industry inside out — and who can see, and prove, an inefficiency that AI can now collapse. You bring access, data, and credibility; we bring the build team and the platform.

We accept applications from anywhere in the world. Our active focus is the GCC, Southeast Asia, and Africa, but the Fellowship has no nationality or residency requirement. The minimum in-person commitment in Doha is small (see above).

The application starts with a short form to capture your background and the concept. Promising applicants then move to a sequence of conversations with the Studio team and the investment team to assess fit on three axes: domain depth, AI-native potential, and co-build chemistry. The process is selective and referral-led; we shape the Fellowship around the people we say yes to.

The Fellowship is equally relevant for more mature, already incorporated companies. For these Fellows the work is bespoke: we use the same co-build approach to sharpen your moat, accelerate GTM, deepen product, and increase investment exposure. There is also potential to extend this into ongoing value-add support after an initial investment.

The Fellow owns 100% of the concept and the IP created for it. The Studio retains a non-exclusive, royalty-free learning licence to use methods, derivatives, and learnings for its own work — strictly internal. Any code, models, or tools The Studio builds for the concept are licensed back to you in perpetuity, with you bearing future hosting and maintenance costs.

The HoldCo is incorporated in one of four approved jurisdictions: Singapore, ADGM, the UK, or Delaware. We pick the right home with you, based on your customers, investors, and stage. If you have an existing HoldCo, we may set up a Qatar-based subsidiary (QFC SubCo) to anchor regional operations.

Alongside discovery we run incorporation, the enterprise trust pack (security, data handling, model governance, escalation), and the customer data-rights contracts that protect your moat. The point is simple: when your first enterprise pilot is ready to pay, procurement can't slow you down.

If a concept is genuinely abandoned, you receive written notice and a 30-day cure period to either resume meaningful development or confirm discontinuation. If the concept is discontinued, rights transfer to The Studio for internal reuse — anonymised and stripped of personal or third-party data — so future Fellows can build on what was learned.

The co-build runs across nine modules: Onboarding, Discovery, Concept, Legal, Brand, Product, GTM, Fundraising, and Operations. Each module has clear outputs and a gate review. The full spine assumes you walk in with nothing — but most Fellows arrive with something. We subtract, compress, and accelerate around what you bring, rather than running a fixed script.

Gates aren't theatre for investors. They're stops where the team — you, the Studio Directors, and selected experts — pressure-test the evidence. Are we right about the problem, the buyer, the moat, the unit economics? Eight gates over six months, plus four "kill signals" that fire automatically if the AI isn't getting smarter, the moat isn't real, accuracy slips, or capability shifts under us.

By the end of Month 2 you're typically incorporated with legal and brand foundations in place. By Month 5 you've shipped the first real version of the product to design partners. By Month 6 you're running pilots, packaging the data room, and either closing a SAFE, extending the Fellowship, or sunsetting cleanly.

You meet the founding partners up front, then work day-to-day with two Studio Directors — one for Product, one for Technology. Around them sit Prototype Engineers, a Design Lead, Marketing and BD leads, an Ops Lead, the Funds team, and Comms. The cadence and intensity of each relationship is agreed at onboarding, not improvised in crisis.

Utopia OS is the operating system of the Studio — a set of shared components every venture can plug into rather than rebuild from scratch. It compounds across companies: each new Fellow extends it, and inherits everything the Fellows before them helped build.

Utopia Cloud is the infrastructure layer — compute, storage, and secure environments built for AI-native workloads, with regional data residency where it matters. Fellows access it directly during the build and inherit it post spin-out.

The AI-native Stack is the set of model orchestration, evaluation, fine-tuning, and agent components we use to ship products fast and keep them honest. It includes the eval harness that catches regressions and the data loops that turn customer use into compounding accuracy.

For ventures where quantum methods are part of the long-term moat — optimisation, materials, cryptography — we run an applied sandbox so Fellows can test what's real now and what to design for next, without standing up infrastructure alone.

Skills are the institutional knowledge of the Studio in reusable form: design playbooks, BD motions, hiring patterns, fundraise templates, and operating reps from previous co-builds. Every Fellow uses them; every Fellow contributes back.