The Startup Studio Battlefield Is Shifting: New Global Hubs to Keep an Eye On

The global startup studio map is being redrawn faster than most people realize.

Studios don't follow opportunities anymore. They follow friction. The kind that's too complex for solo founders but structured enough that the right infrastructure unlocks it at scale. The regions with the most valuable friction aren't the ones everyone's still watching.

The venture studio model doubled to 10.7% of all new fund strategies in 2024. The pattern appears in Startup Genome's 2025 report, InNiches' studio research, and our own directory: studios are forming fastest where structural advantages exist that Silicon Valley, New York, and London simply can't replicate.

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Europe’s Cross-Border Advantage

Eight European cities rank in the top 40 global ecosystems. Europe has nearly matched North America in total studio count.

Studios can recruit across 27 EU countries without visa friction. Compare that to a US studio trying to hire someone from India: 6-month wait, lottery system, maybe you get lucky. If you find the right person in Warsaw, they start in Amsterdam next week.

Paris jumped to #12 globally this year. Studios like Hexa (formerly eFounders) launched over 40 companies with a combined valuation exceeding $5 billion. Berlin's Bridgemaker leverages Germany's industrial base for B2B ventures. Barcelona's Antai builds e-commerce and on-demand marketplaces with natural expansion into Spanish-speaking markets.

European studios are adapting to AI faster than their North American counterparts in some verticals. When you can pull talent from 27 countries and test products across wildly different regulatory environments simultaneously, you catch blind spots that single-market studios would’ve missed.

Talent mobility compresses hiring costs. Studios can arbitrage salary expectations across markets. Senior engineers in Warsaw cost half as much as in Amsterdam but ship to the same standard. That lowers costs and extends the runway. But regulatory fragmentation slows portfolio velocity. A product needing privacy approval across 27 jurisdictions can take significantly longer to reach market fit.

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The Gulf and MENA: Where Government Backing Means Something

The Middle East and North Africa are where studios are forming fastest relative to ecosystem maturity. Governments here treat studios like infrastructure.

Sovereign-wealth-fund-backed VC activity through firms like STV and Wa'ed Ventures, combined with the UAE's first dedicated studio license in the DIFC (Dubai's financial free zone), turned government policy into competitive advantage.

Studios here tackle massive underserved markets in fintech, logistics, and Arabic-language AI. MENA is among the fastest-growing regions for new studio formation.

Sovereign backing changes fund economics entirely. Traditional studio LPs expect 3-5 year exits to show DPI. Sovereign funds operate on 10-20 year horizons and care more about economic diversification than IRR optimization. This shifts portfolio construction from 15-20 ventures under fast-exit pressure to 5-8 deeper infrastructure plays with longer holds, enabling bigger bets Western VCs won’t fund. Studios can recruit operators who want to build lasting businesses rather than flip startups for quick exits.

But government backing creates government dependency. When Vision 2030 priorities shift, or sovereign fund strategies change, studios aligned too closely with specific mandates find their thesis obsolete overnight.

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Southeast Asia Built the Infrastructure First

While exits cratered almost everywhere else, Asian ecosystems defied the slide. Government programs created actual infrastructure for studios to build on, rather than rhetoric and unusable tax credits.

Jakarta soared to #2 among emerging ecosystems globally. Vietnam and Malaysia are seeing early-stage momentum, creating an interconnected regional ecosystem where studios validate in one market and deploy across borders seamlessly.

Southeast Asian markets share DNA. Mobile-first consumers, emerging middle classes, infrastructure gaps. What works in Vietnam also works in Malaysia or Indonesia.

Launcho Ventures scaled Gong Cha bubble tea to 2,000 outlets across 18 countries. The Radical Fund's AI-native studio tackles climate with solar financing for middle-class homeowners, affordable drinking water systems, using LiDAR to restore degraded farmland. Manas has launched 15+ ventures across multiple regions.

Southeast Asia leapfrogged legacy infrastructure entirely. Grab and Gojek didn't disrupt credit cards or taxi monopolies. They built in a vacuum and became the infrastructure. Most people in Indonesia never had a credit card before they had a Gojek wallet.

Studios building here don't need to convince users to switch from existing services. They're creating the category. Unit economics can work earlier in sectors like payments because there's no incumbent pricing to undercut.

The risk is political. What government programs create, government priorities can undo. When regulatory winds shift or foreign investment policy changes, infrastructure advantages can evaporate faster than they were built.

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Africa’s Informal Economy Problem

In many markets, capital isn't the primary constraint. It’s capital that understands the market structure.

Roughly 80% of Sub-Saharan Africa's economic activity operates outside traditional systems. Building for informal economies requires deep local knowledge, creative distribution, systematic testing, and capital that understands the market won't move linearly.

Western studios assume digital advertising works as it does back home. In markets where trust flows through community networks, customer acquisition means field agents and community organizing, not Facebook ads. By the time they figure that out, they've burned through runway.

Payment reliability compounds the problem. In Kenya, where most people use M-Pesa (think East Africa's equivalent of Venmo, via text messages), transactions clear instantly. In markets without it, studios need cash collection infrastructure. That's not a tech problem. That's a logistics problem that completely changes unit economics.

Lagos overtook Nairobi as Sub-Saharan Africa's regional leader on the strength of three unicorns: Andela, Flutterwave, and Moniepoint. Yet Sub-Saharan Africa remains one of the smallest studio markets today, even as ecosystem conditions mature faster than studios are forming.

Pyramidia in Nairobi builds climate-smart AgTech. Delta40 focuses on pan-African ventures. Mstudio launched as the first mobile-driven studio in Francophone West Africa.

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The Studio Model's Competitive Advantage isn't Universal. It's Regional.

Studios in San Francisco offer shared services, reduced risk, operational support. But when founders can easily hire, fundraise, and scale independently, those advantages matter less. The market already has accessible capital, mature talent pools, and established infrastructure.

Emerging hubs flip the calculus entirely. Solo founders in Lagos can't build cash collection infrastructure alone. Founders in Riyadh can't access sovereign capital operating on 20-year timelines. Founders in Jakarta can't validate across five Southeast Asian markets simultaneously. Studios in these regions unlock possibilities that don't exist otherwise.

For LPs, this creates an asymmetric opportunity. Studios native to these regions compete on structural advantages that compound, not execution quality. The returns won't come from studios with the best SF track record trying to expand. They'll come from studios built in markets where the model itself creates disproportionate value.

The studio with the most capital isn't necessarily the studio that can help founders win. What matters more is whether they understand the structural friction in your specific market.

The global studio map isn't being redrawn. It's being rewritten by capital structure mismatch and infrastructure asymmetry, the kinds of advantages traditional hubs simply can't replicate.

Check out our Startup Studio Directory to see which studios are poised to use structural friction to their advantage.