WOI.eco Expands Venture Studio Network to Five Countries, Building Companies Around Problem Experts
On October 7, WOI.eco, a venture studio organization founded and chaired by Shafi Shoukath, announced its expansion into five markets: the UAE, India, Kenya, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka. The organization treats unsolved national problems as an undiscovered market map and focuses on identifying people who understand those problems deeply, building companies around their expertise.
Unlike traditional accelerators that select from applications, WOI.eco uses a co-building studio model. It provides structure, technical depth through centers of excellence, and partners with corporations that act as first customers rather than sponsors. Shoukath argues that the standard approach of finding a market first should be inverted: find people who know a problem intimately and build the company around them.
Underpinning the strategy is a bet about AI: as AI drives down the cost of acquiring knowledge, domain expertise becomes a depreciating advantage, while the ability to imagine, question, create, adapt, and act appreciates. The organization calls the deliberate development of these capabilities "Human Being 2.0." Shoukath believes domain proximity will outperform credentialed expertise as AI commoditizes credentials.
The five markets are deliberately diverse. The UAE provides capital and mobile talent; India offers scale and engineering depth; Kenya is home to inventive fintech and agritech environments; Malaysia combines industrial capability with Southeast Asian access; and Sri Lanka has untapped talent and location advantages. WOI.eco frames the network as the product, enabling capital, technology, and companies to move across markets.
The model faces obstacles, including high capital intensity, slow returns, cross-border regulatory friction, and the historical tendency of ecosystem programs to report cohort counts rather than surviving companies. Shoukath says the model should be judged on companies built, capital returned, and industries created.
