Utopian · for Core Vision Investments

Deal flow you can read before you meet.

Utopian is where 92 Saudi founders are building right now, through six stages with an evidence gate at each. Here is what that leaves behind, and what a sourcing team can do with it.

Prepared for the Core Vision Investment team · September 2026 · press the arrow key or space to continue · press F for full screen · swipe or tap the arrow to continue

What arrives

There have never been more founders.

Commercial registrations passed 1.9 million by mid 2026, up 12 percent in a year. Venture capital hit a record $1.72 billion across 257 deals in 2025, first in the region for a third year.

Ministry of Commerce, Q2 2026 · MAGNiTT, Saudi Arabia 2025

And close to a third of adults are building something.

Some 29 percent of adults aged 18 to 64 are starting or running a venture, up from 12.1 percent in 2018. Third of 53 economies for entrepreneurial environment, first among high-income economies for entrepreneurial finance.

Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2025/26

Almost all of it reaches you as a pitch.

Ten minutes, a deck, and a number the founder chose. Two ventures can arrive with the same slide and be a year apart in what they actually know, and nothing in the room tells you which is which.

So diligence starts from zero, every time.

Your team rebuilds by hand what the founder already learned: the customer, the willingness to pay, what was tested and what was only assumed. The funnel stays narrow not for lack of appetite, but because looking properly is expensive.

The method

On Utopian a venture is built in six stages, and every one has a gate.

Ideation, business model, validation, prototype, execution, pitch deck. A stage closes only once the platform has verified the evidence behind it, so stage three means the same thing for every venture here.

Evidence arrives four ways, each tied to an assumption.

Customer interviews, surveys, landing pages, prototypes. Before any of them runs, the founder writes down what they believe and what would prove them wrong. That is the difference between activity and evidence.

Four axes, scored on what was verified.

Desirability, feasibility, viability, market size. The score rises as evidence accumulates, and the platform checks that evidence before it closes a stage. You are not reading a self-assessment.

No self-reporting · no boxes ticked without work

Four decisions at every gate, each kept with its evidence.

Each decision is stored with what it rested on, so a venture reads as a chronology rather than a snapshot. Stopping counts: a founder who stopped early and said why is legible in a way a quiet failure never is.

What you see

Your thesis, applied to everything being built.

Sector, stage, depth of validation, how recently a venture moved. We run it across the platform and it returns a short list, not an inbox. The city is laid out by sector, so a thesis maps straight onto districts.

Then you read the record before you take the meeting.

What the founder assumed, what they tested, what the market answered, what they decided and when. Ten minutes with that beats ten minutes with a deck, and it says the same thing to every reader.

And the public view is not for sale.

A public leaderboard ranks the top fifty by verified work. No jury, no vote, no paid placement. A venture's position is a fact about the venture, which is what makes it worth reading.

Founder signal

The founder is half your decision, and the half a pitch hides.

Five angles are scored before a riyal is spent. The sharper signal is underneath: how fast the first test ran, how they answered a result they did not want, whether they pivoted on evidence or on mood.

First Light is the moment that cannot be performed.

When a venture completes verified validation, its tower lights for the first time. Light cannot be bought, borrowed or faked. Ninety-two ventures are climbing toward it, and you can watch which ones are moving.

Elevation is work, and light is proof.

Where this sits

Two of these three lines are already drawn.

RAÝH sits in Core Vision's portfolio and has just joined Utopian as a founding investor partner. A firm you already back looked at this closely and chose to partner, which is where this introduction came from.

An evaluation can only be as good as what it is fed.

Every scoring model works from what the founder hands in: a form, filled in once, written to persuade. Nothing better has existed to put into it, because the work that would prove the answers was never written down. The gap is in the market, not in anyone's model.

We sit twelve to eighteen months upstream of the raise.

Core Vision acquired VeFund in 2024, which evaluates and connects at the point of raise. Utopian is the year before, where evidence is generated rather than assembled. A venture reaches an evaluation with its working already shown.

And the institutions are already the same ones.

Utopian launched from the main stage of the Center of Digital Entrepreneurship, where VeFund has also helped run demo days. Monshaat and the Social Development Bank are on the same list. Those are the programmes that would run cohorts here.

Utopian is Saudi-born and supported by NTDP, CODE and the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology.

The proposal

Start with a venture you already passed on.

Pick one you liked but could not verify. We run it through validation, and in 21 days you see the record, and what your decision would have looked like with it in hand. Then tell us what you want to see and cannot find, and we put it to the founders here and into the next cohort brief.

After that, a standing window: when a venture here clears a threshold you set, you hear about it first. Nothing exclusive, nothing to pay to try.

Next step

Core Vision reads evidence. Utopian is where it gets made.

Thirty minutes, one venture you already know, and the record it leaves behind.

utopian.sa

Jamal Khan · support@utopian.sa · Riyadh