stc group Launches Corporate Venture-Building Arm colab at LEAP 2026

stc group chose LEAP 2026 to announce colab, its new innovation and corporate venture-building arm. The launch adds a new dimension to the group's venture ecosystem rather than acting as another standalone initiative. Colab will systematically identify, build, and scale new digital ventures. It will explore emerging opportunities and experiment with new technologies and business models. Only validated opportunities will be turned into scalable businesses. Instead of merely funding outside teams, stc group will own and operate the businesses it creates.

Colab will do that from a position of accumulated strengths. stc group's market reach, digital infrastructure, and industry expertise are all available to the new unit. Those assets give an internally built venture advantages a fresh startup cannot match, including immediate distribution, existing customer relationships, and expertise in regulated services like telecom and banking.

The new arm completes an ecosystem stc group has been assembling for years. InspireU, its acceleration programme, has accelerated more than 150 startups. Tali ventures, its strategic investment arm, backs high-growth technology companies. Colab covers the stage neither of those address directly: founding businesses inside stc group and growing them to independence. With the three units side by side, stc group can support external founders, back outside teams, and build its own ventures under one roof.

Motaz Alangari, stc group's Chief Investment Officer, said the launch rests on a foundation the company built across venture investments, acceleration, and venture building. The integrated model, he said, allows stc group to systematically create and scale new businesses. He described colab as reflecting the company's commitment to shaping the next phase of the Kingdom's ambition. stc group will work with founders and strategic players, he added, to widen the region's innovation pipeline.

stc group has already shown what an internally built venture can look like. STC Bank began as stc pay, a digital wallet launched to address an emerging market opportunity. That wallet grew into a fintech unicorn and later evolved into a fully licensed digital bank. It now serves more than eight million customers and generated revenues exceeding SAR1 billion in 2025. The path from wallet to bank was not the product of a venture-building process; it came first. Colab exists to make that kind of path repeatable.

That is the real departure. Building one business inside a large company can depend on timing and executive sponsorship. Creating a dedicated venture-building unit turns individual success into a process of continuous selection, experimentation and scaling. Some ventures will fail; stc group absorbs those costs in exchange for compounding experience on the ones that work. In the same motion, colab is meant to pull founders and strategic players into stc group's orbit, widening the region's innovation pipeline rather than simply drawing from it. The unit has not yet presented a portfolio. But the claim behind its mandate is clear: stc group will generate new digital businesses from its own pipeline, by design, and it wants the region's founders to feed that pipeline instead of building elsewhere.