At A-typical Ventures, we spend a lot of time thinking about the future of work, not just how work gets done, but how organizations create environments where people can perform at their best. The next generation of category-defining companies will not only optimize productivity; they will re-architect the human experience of work itself. That is why we are excited to invest in Wellbees.

Work has changed permanently, especially after COVID: Distributed teams, digital collaboration, and always-on communication have reshaped the employee experience. Yet, the infrastructure supporting employee wellbeing has lagged behind. Most organizations still rely on fragmented point solutions: one vendor for mental health, another for engagement surveys, another for fitness benefits, and yet another for community building. The result is predictable: low utilization, limited insight, and programs that exist more as policy than practice.

Wellbees addresses this gap with a unified, AI-powered employee wellbeing platform designed to embed wellbeing directly into the daily fabric of work. The platform delivers personalized wellbeing journeys, expert consultations, social engagement tools, and analytics in a single, integrated environment, transforming wellbeing from a disconnected initiative into a measurable organizational capability. One of the most compelling features of the application, which impacts the lives of employees in over 100 countries, is its availability in 38 languages. This service also includes online consultations with local experts. The platform also offers flexible solutions such as the Next Generation EAP, Global Challenge Event, Challenge Plan, Resilience Program, and a Holistic Wellbeing Platform.

What stood out to us immediately was the product philosophy. Wellbees approaches wellbeing holistically across multiple dimensions, including physical, emotional, financial, social, and occupational wellbeing, recognizing that performance at work is inseparable from overall human health. This systems-level thinking mirrors how modern organizations actually function. People don’t experience stress, motivation, or burnout in silos. Solutions shouldn’t either.

But product vision alone is not enough. Adoption is everything in HR technology. One of the persistent challenges in corporate wellbeing is utilization: companies invest heavily in benefits that employees rarely use. Wellbees flips this dynamic by building engagement mechanics directly into the platform: social challenges, clubs, content library, habit tracking, rewards, expert access, and personalized recommendations designed to create sustained participation. The result is a platform that organizations can rely on not just to exist, but to actually change behavior.

We also believe the timing is particularly compelling. Organizations globally are rethinking talent retention, culture, and employee engagement. In a world where talent is increasingly mobile and expectations are rising, wellbeing has moved from a “nice-to-have” to a strategic imperative. Companies that invest in human experience outperform those that treat it as an afterthought. Wellbees sits squarely at this intersection between HR infrastructure, analytics, and employee experience.

Another factor that resonated strongly with us is the company’s global ambition. Founded in Istanbul, Wellbees has expanded across multiple countries, serving organizations through a scalable B2B SaaS model with localized content and AI-driven personalization. This ability to build globally from day one while maintaining cultural adaptability is a hallmark of category leaders emerging from frontier and growth markets.

From an investment perspective, we are particularly excited about the data layer that Wellbees is building. Employee wellbeing has historically been difficult to measure. HR teams rely on periodic surveys and lagging indicators such as attrition. Wellbees provides real-time insights into engagement, mood, participation, and organizational health, enabling companies to manage culture with the same rigor applied to financial performance.

This creates a powerful flywheel. As more employees engage with the platform, organizations gain richer insights. Those insights enable better interventions, which improve outcomes, which in turn drive deeper engagement. Over time, wellbeing becomes not just a benefit, but a core operational system that can demonstrate improved performance and talent retention.

Equally important is the leadership behind the company. Founder and CEO Melis Abacıoğlu brings a unique combination of entrepreneurial experience, product vision, and mission-driven focus. Her track record of building community-centered platforms and scaling engagement-driven products is evident in Wellbees’ design and execution.

At A-typical Ventures, we back founders who are building infrastructure for how the world will operate in the next decade. We believe employee wellbeing will become a foundational layer of modern organizations, much like CRM systems became essential for customer management. The companies that win will be those that integrate deeply into workflows, generate actionable data, and create tangible value for both employees and employers.

Wellbees is doing exactly that.

The future of work will be defined not just by automation and AI, but by how effectively organizations empower people. Productivity, creativity, and resilience all stem from human wellbeing. Companies that understand this will build stronger cultures, retain better talent, and outperform over time.

We believe Wellbees is building the operating system for that future, one where wellbeing is embedded, measurable, and scalable.

And that is why we invested.

The GCC is in the midst of one of the most ambitious financial expansions globally.

Fintech in the region is projected to grow from roughly $10.5 billion in 2025 to nearly $30 billion by 2032, while digital banking is expected to reach $47 billion over the same period. Capital is not in short supply. Access to it, however, remains uneven.

Across the region, trillions of dollars flow through sovereign wealth funds, capital markets and financial institutions. Yet the systems that govern how that capital is allocated, how risk is assessed, how credit is extended and how transactions are executed remain fragmented and, in many cases, poorly adapted to local conditions.

The imbalance is particularly evident in small and medium-sized enterprise financing. SMEs account for a significant share of economic activity, contributing up to half of GDP in parts of the GCC, yet face a funding gap estimated at more than $250 billion. Banks are well capitalised but often unable to lend efficiently, constrained by limited data, slow underwriting processes and rigid risk models. Only a small portion of SME credit is digitised, lagging far behind consumer lending.

Similar frictions persist across the broader financial system. Digital payments are expanding rapidly, particularly in markets such as Saudi Arabia, but cross-border transactions remain complex and costly. Insurance continues to rely heavily on broker-led distribution, with pricing and underwriting processes that are largely manual. Meanwhile, companies operating across multiple jurisdictions must navigate overlapping regulatory frameworks that add time and cost to scaling.

Financial activity in the region is accelerating, but the infrastructure supporting it has not kept pace.

That gap is becoming more consequential. As embedded finance, digital payments and AI-driven risk models gain traction, the efficiency of the underlying systems will increasingly determine how effectively capital is deployed.

The real opportunity sits beneath the surface.

Not in consumer-facing applications, but in the infrastructure that underpins them: underwriting systems that unlock SME credit, data and intelligence layers for capital markets, real-time treasury and settlement platforms, and regulatory technologies that simplify compliance across jurisdictions.

This is where we focus at A-typical.

We invest in system-level companies that improve how capital is allocated, priced and moved, because these are the layers that determine how efficiently entire financial systems operate.

These systems, once embedded, are difficult to displace. They are reinforced by regulatory alignment, proprietary data and network effects that compound over time.

Capital in the GCC will continue to expand and the biggest winners will be those building the systems that determine where, and how efficiently, it flows.

At A-typical Ventures, we spend a lot of time thinking about where capital is moving faster than the tools built to manage it. Data centre infrastructure is one of the clearest examples of that tension today, and we believe Azraq is well positioned to tackle it.

The Problem Is Structural, Not Cyclical

Data centre investment is accelerating at a pace the industry’s risk infrastructure was not built to handle. U.S. credit deals alone reached $182B in 2025, nearly double the prior year. Hyperscaler capex commitments through 2030 are forecast at $3 trillion. Yet the tools underwriting that capital remain unchanged: bespoke consultant reports costing up to $1M per engagement, produced over weeks, delivered as static PDFs, and unable to support portfolio-level comparison or continuous monitoring.

The consequences are measurable. In 2025, 57% of data centre projects experienced delays of three months or more. Each month of slippage on a 60MW facility costs approximately $14.2M in lost revenue. Despite the scale of capital at risk, lenders, insurers, and institutional investors lack a single platform that quantifies and monitors the six core risk dimensions driving project outcomes: market demand, environmental exposure, infrastructure reliability, social and labour constraints, regulatory complexity, and financial covenant performance.

That is the gap Azraq was built to fill.

The Platform

Azraq is an AI-powered risk intelligence platform that consolidates these six dimensions into a single, continuous risk layer for data centre assets and portfolios. The platform runs Monte Carlo simulations across several metrics to produce lender-grade outputs – Value at Risk, DSCR distributions, covenant breach probability – replacing the fragmented combination of consultants, market databases, and bespoke assessments that currently define the sector’s due diligence standard.

The model is multi-sided. Developers and operators use Azraq to demonstrate project bankability and reduce financing friction. Lenders and insurers use it to standardize credit underwriting and risk pricing. Advisory firms embed it into transaction workflows. What makes this commercially compelling is the flywheel: if lenders adopt Azraq’s risk scores as a credit decision input, sell-side adoption becomes structurally non-optional. That pull-through mechanism, if it holds, is the architecture of a category.

How We Got Here: The Studio Relationship

Azraq became a co-build partner of The Utopia Studio, the venture building arm of our platform, entering a structured engagement that gave us direct visibility into the product, the founder, and the execution process over several months. That proximity matters. The Studio relationship gave us due diligence depth, and allowed us to closely support Azraq through their co-building and GTM processes. The co-build model is central to how we think about early-stage conviction. We get close, we contribute, and we invest. Azraq is one of the clearest examples of that approach working as intended.

Why Now, Why Here

The regulatory backdrop is accelerating the demand. EU energy efficiency directives, U.S. state-level water and power legislation, data residency mandates across the GCC – each layer adds complexity that manual advisory cannot absorb at transaction velocity. As data centre debt is increasingly securitised through ABS structures, rating agencies and institutional co-lenders are demanding consistent, repeatable risk methodology. The market is creating the requirement. Azraq is building the tool.

The GCC dimension matters to us specifically. Sovereign-led digital infrastructure programmes are deploying capital into data centres, AI compute, and smart infrastructure at a scale that requires institutional-grade risk frameworks. Azraq is positioned to become the credit risk intelligence layer for that build-out – not as a generic compliance tool, but as infrastructure intelligence embedded into the lending and underwriting decisions that determine which projects get financed.

The Founder

Alexandra Coleman is a Chartered Electrical Engineer with a background that maps precisely onto this problem. She spent over seven years at Arup delivering large-scale infrastructure, was first runner-up for the UK CIBSE Engineer of the Year Award, and served as Chief Engineering Officer at BeZero Carbon – a global carbon ratings agency. Her combination of engineering depth and capital markets exposure is not common, and it is directly relevant to building a platform that must earn the trust of institutional lenders and insurers.

What We Believe

The data centre sector is accumulating institutional-scale capital exposure against pre-institutional risk infrastructure. That gap will close. It will close either through the manual, fragmented processes that have defined the industry to date, or through a platform that standardises, automates, and continuously monitors risk across the asset lifecycle.

We believe Azraq is building that platform. The multi-metric framework, the risk simulation engine, the geopolitical risk coverage purpose-built for emerging markets – these are not features that get assembled quickly by an incumbent looking to extend. They reflect deep domain work by a founder who has spent her career at the intersection of infrastructure engineering and capital markets.

Having worked alongside Alexandra through The Utopia Studio before committing fund capital, we have seen that work up close. At A-typical Ventures, we invest in founders solving problems that are real, structural, and underserved in the markets we know. Data centre risk intelligence for the GCC and beyond is exactly that kind of problem.

We are proud to back Alexandra and the Azraq team as they build the risk standard for the infrastructure behind AI.

Backed by Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) and Qatar Development Bank (QDB), Utopia Capital Management, a pioneer in emerging and frontier market investments, on Monday launched A-typical Ventures, a new driving force for early-stage venture innovation across the Middle East’s startup ecosystem.

Unveiled at the Web Summit 2025, A-typical Ventures will launch a venture studio, and it is actively seeking the region’s entrepreneurs looking to scale innovations and drive economic diversification across sectors such as fintech, healthtech, e-Commerce, logistics and mobility, and climatetech. The Qatar Financial Centre (QFC)-domiciled A-typical Ventures will enable Pre-seed, Seed and Pre-series A founders across the GCC (Gulf Co-operation Council), Levant, Pakistan and Turkiye to refine their business models, optimise their go-to-market strategies, and unlock powerful growth opportunities.

The QDB will be supporting A-typical Ventures through the creation of a venture studio, providing hands-on strategic and operational support to startups within the latter’s ecosystem. The QIA’s investment marks one of the first deployments of capital from its ‘Fund of Funds’ programme, which aims to develop a strong start-up and venture capital ecosystem in Qatar and attract leading venture capital funds and entrepreneurs to the region.

“A-typical Ventures represents a next-generation approach to early-stage venture investing and building. This is an incredibly exciting time for the region, and we are eager to contribute to the growth of a thriving, innovation-driven venture economy,” said Alina Truhina, managing partner of Southeast Asia and the Middle East at Utopia.

Fatma Ali al-Khater, who is joining A-typical Ventures as a partner said the Middle East is at a “pivotal” moment in building a thriving startup ecosystem. Finding the unique opportunity to shape startup ecosystem’s future, she said “with my deep-rooted experience in the region’s economic and investment landscape, I am committed to supporting A-typical Ventures to lay the foundations for a robust ecosystem that enables startups to scale faster, build stronger and make a lasting impact on the regional economy.”

“Qatar is once again proving itself as an unparalleled hub for startups and innovation,” said Mohammed al-Emadi, QDB executive director of Investment and Incubation.

Asserting that QDB is co-building the next generation of game-changing ventures; he said its collaboration with Utopia and the Qatari partners marks a bold step toward reshaping the startup landscape. By merging strategic investment with hands-on venture-building expertise, QDB aims to empower high-potential startups in Qatar and across the Middle East, helping them scale faster, break into new markets, and drive real economic impact.

“This is yet another leap to position Qatar and the region as a global powerhouse for disruptive innovation and high-growth ventures,” he said.

As Qatar’s leading enabler of entrepreneurship and private sector development, QDB brings a wealth of expertise and experience to this venture, leveraging its deep understanding of fostering a dynamic, innovation-driven startup ecosystem.