Alina Truhina is a Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Utopia Capital Management, a platform spanning VC funds and a venture studio investing across emerging markets. The firm operates Atypical Ventures, a Middle East-plus fund covering Turkey and Pakistan, Radical Fund focused on climate in Southeast Asia, and the recently launched UTOPIA Studio – an AI-native company builder that both creates new ventures and re-engineers portfolio companies for scale. Based in Doha, the firm recently partnered with the Qatar Investment Authority as one of the first international VCs to receive backing from its $1B Fund of Funds program.

Born in Europe during the Soviet era, Alina's family moved to Australia as political refugees – an experience that shaped her conviction that talent in emerging markets deserves the same access to capital and networks available in the West. This led her to build investment vehicles across Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, evolving from impact grants to blended finance and now to a fully integrated venture studio model designed to take founders from idea to Series A in under 24 months.

She joins the podcast to discuss why copying and pasting Western VC models to the Global South is a recipe for failure, the "Problem-Oriented Deep Dives" (PODs) framework she uses to identify category-defining opportunities, why climate adaptation is the overlooked half of the climate crisis, and her contrarian view that the standard "2 and 20" VC fee structure is fundamentally broken for emerging markets.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:05:00 – The Utopia Platform: Funds, Studio & Structure
00:07:30 – Why Emerging Markets?
00:09:45 – Personal Journey: From Refugee to VC
00:13:00 – Climate Investing: Mitigation vs. Adaptation
00:20:00 – Building Category-Defining Companies with AI
00:23:00 – PODs: Problem-Oriented Deep Dives
00:25:30 – The Venture Studio Model
00:29:00 – What Makes a Great Founder?
00:31:30 – Why Doha as HQ & The QIA Partnership
00:43:00 – What Makes a Good Investor?
00:50:30 – Biggest Misconception About Emerging Markets

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Transcript: https://share.transistor.fm/s/25f4e507/transcript.txt

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