Built Here, Designed to Travel

GREAT TECHNOLOGIES DON’T SELL THEMSELVES

Building a successful technology is only the first step in launching a venture. The bigger challenge is winning customers outside its home market. A local track record builds credibility for other markets, but it’s hardly a stamped passport. Often, the use case that won the first market doesn’t apply to the next one.

Deep-tech ventures carry the cost of that erroneous assumption more sharply than most. Post-launch, they rarely get a second chance to learn why their solution doesn’t already exist elsewhere.

This is why VentureOne, the venture-building and commercialization arm of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), inverts the typical sequence: It identifies and validates problems with local government and industry end-users first.

“In a conventional model, the breakthrough comes first and the market question comes later,” says El Mehdi Abdat, VentureOne’s Chief of Staff and Lead Venture Architect.

The market-first approach establishes whether a venture will stick. A separate process assesses whether the solution, and the value it creates, will travel well.

“We start with the problem, not the product, when we’re looking at the potential for international scale,” says Clementine Dumortier, a Senior Venture Architect at VentureOne. “We ask whether the problem recurs across multiple markets or is specific to one local context. The UAE can be the launch market, but it should not define the venture’s ceiling.”

The UAE offers an unusually good environment in which to build, test, and secure early customer success. Government entities and major corporations move quickly, and a national mandate can help ventures establish reference customers faster than in many other markets. The risk is assuming that early traction will automatically translate elsewhere.

Dumortier points to VentureOne’s portfolio to illustrate her point: ai71 deploys AI solutions in large enterprises, QuantumGate protects organizations against quantum computing threats, SteerAI drives off-road autonomy, and Nabat uses AI and autonomous robotics to assess and restore degraded ecosystems.

“While each venture begins with specific use cases, the problems they address are universal,” she explains. “That is what gives them international potential.”

SEPARATE WHAT TRAVELS FROM WHAT HAS TO BE REBUILT

Universal problems are only a starting point, however. A venture that can travel may need to isolate the core need from the local conditions that make the solution work.

QuantumGate is a clear case of this phenomenon: Sovereignty, one of its key selling points, is among the least portable arguments in technology. It persuades precisely because a capability is nationally held, which is the one thing a buyer in another country cannot be sold. QuantumGate was designed to carry it across the border anyway.

Abdalla AlMajali, VentureOne’s Director of Venture Building, led the launch of QuantumGate in 2024. He explains that in the UAE, post-quantum security was a sovereignty proposition: government entities and major corporations had a strong strategic case to adopt homegrown cryptography. Elsewhere, though, the case was reversed: a cryptographic library developed for another country can be a liability. “The technology may be impressive anywhere, but that doesn’t mean there is an international business case,” he says.

The answer was to build flexibility into the product architecture. QSphere, QuantumGate’s post-quantum VPN, was developed so that the cryptographic libraries underneath it could be swapped. In the UAE, it runs on UAE-developed post-quantum libraries, supporting national technology sovereignty objectives. In another market, a customer can run it on locally developed algorithms instead. “The product does the same job either way,” AlMajali says. “The underlying value proposition travels, while the sovereignty layer can be localized.”

The same principle governs Crypto Discovery, QuantumGate’s cryptographic discovery tool. Organizations everywhere need to know where their cryptographic assets sit and which require remediation. What differs is the standard they are assessed against, which varies by jurisdiction and organization. So, rather than encoding a single UAE framework, the product allows those policies and guidelines to be configured. This makes regulatory fragmentation, which the European Commission identifies as one of the persistent barriers to scaling across markets, a product requirement rather than a market-entry obstacle.

This is why VentureOne treats multi-jurisdiction support, configurable local requirements, and geographically distributed infrastructure as day-one architectural requirements rather than work deferred until international demand appears. “A scalable venture needs a core proposition that travels, while retaining enough flexibility to adapt to local regulation, customer requirements, and market dynamics,” says AlMajali.

BUILD SO THAT ADAPTATION IS AFFORDABLE

Every solution encodes assumptions about the conditions it will operate in and the data it will use. Crossing a border or sector can cause friction. The useful question for businesses is not whether a venture will have to adapt, but what that adaptation will cost—a figure set by architectural decisions made long before the first international conversation.

Modularity is the first control over that cost, treated as a design requirement rather than an aspiration. For example, CoreX, an autonomy system by VentureOne’s off-road autonomy venture, SteerAI, is deliberately platform-agnostic: its modular hardware kit and software stack, complete with perception, localization, navigation, and decision-making technologies, can be integrated with vehicles it was not specifically designed for. That is, it sells capability over product, meaning it doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel for every new market it enters.

“Scale isn’t a phase you get to later,” says Abdat. “If a solution only works as a bespoke system, every new customer or new market becomes a rebuild. You have to understand how the market and its players actually operate, their processes, their constraints, what they can maintain and operate themselves, and design modules around that. This way, the interfaces adapt to each context while the core technology can travel.”

Ongoing research is another control mechanism. Technologies come to VentureOne from the Technology Innovation Institute (TII), ATRC’s research arm, at Technology Readiness Level 6 or 7, which means a prototype that has been demonstrated in an operational environment. VentureOne and TII teams then continue co-developing it to full commercial readiness, with researchers still engaged as the product is refined against customer feedback.

This iteration process is key as a venture prepares to enter a new operating environment. When Nabat, VentureOne’s ecosystem restoration venture, expanded from coastal mangrove restoration into dryland ecosystems, its ecology, research, and engineering teams adapted to different scientific measurements, monitoring timelines, and data formats while preserving the same end-to-end approach to ecosystem restoration.

“The data and methods adapt, but the approach is the same. It doesn’t end at intervention. From mapping and assessing the environment to restoring and independently verifying outcomes, the full cycle is what we hold constant,” Georges Ibrahim, Nabat’s Vice President of Operations, says.

For new ventures, the adaptive work begins even before the first use case is fixed.

“One of our upcoming technology ventures is still at an early stage, but we’re applying the same principle from the outset,” explains AlMajali. “While our initial use case in the UAE is real estate, the core infrastructure, focused on tokenization of real-world assets, is not designed around a single asset class.” The reasoning is that the most compelling tokenization use cases differ by market: real estate in one country; commodities, funds, private-market assets or art in another. Building that flexibility in at the start allows the venture to prove itself through one focused use case without being confined to it later.

FOCUSED, NOT LOCALLY CONSTRAINED

“Building for international scale does not mean trying to launch everywhere at once,” AlMajali cautions. “There is value in being focused: choosing a strong initial market, solving a specific customer problem, and proving that the product works. There is an important distinction between being focused and being locally constrained.”

The evidence suggests how much this early discipline is worth. McKinsey’s 2025 Europe’s Moonshot Moment report indicated that Europe’s constraint is neither talent nor technology, but the deliberate work of building companies designed to scale, with fewer than three percent of European software companies going on to reach €1 billion in revenue.

Fortunately, VentureOne has structural help in doing that work: early funding through ATRC means a venture is not forced to demonstrate international traction before it has fully understood an international market.

“Our aim is to build ventures that can prove themselves in the UAE, while making the strategic and technical decisions early enough that succeeding locally becomes a springboard for international growth rather than something we have to rebuild for,” says AlMajali.

To put it simply: technology that works is where the real work begins, not where it ends. VentureOne doesn’t wait for a venture to succeed at home before asking whether it can succeed anywhere else. That question gets built into the venture from day one, as fundamental to its design as the technology itself.