The lobby of a residential tower is a theatre of tiny delays. A visitor gives a name. A guard reaches for a phone. Somewhere above, a resident misses the call. The visitor waits beside a ficus that has witnessed this scene so often it deserves a salary. To most people, the pause is simply part of apartment life. To Khaled Alhaj, it looked like a product brief.
Alhaj is the co-founder and CEO of Munily, a Panama-born software company built around the many handoffs that make a community function. The platform connects residents, security staff and administrators. It handles visitor access, communication, shared-space reservations, payments and operational records. The promise is practical: fewer calls, fewer notebooks, less ambiguity at the exact moment somebody needs an answer.
It is a revealing business to build. Community management lives in the gap between private life and public routine. The software has to be simple enough for a guest, fast enough for a guard and useful enough for an administrator who will still be reconciling the day after everyone else has gone home. A glossy demo cannot rescue a clumsy morning at the gate.
An education in invisible work
Before Munily, Alhaj worked in the finance department of the Waldorf Astoria Panama. The detail matters because a hotel is an intensive course in invisible coordination. Guests notice the room, the breakfast and the view. They rarely see the ledger, the shift change or the chain of small decisions that keeps the experience from wobbling. Finance offers a particularly clear window into those operations: every seamless gesture eventually becomes a line that must add up.
Alhaj studied international business at Quality Leadership University from 2016 to 2019. During roughly the same period, Munily began to take shape with cofounders Marwa Hage, Mitchell Contreras and Carlos de la Guardia. Public company records alternate between 2018 and 2019 as the starting point. Alhaj himself has said, “En 2019 comenzamos en Panamá,” and the business that followed was unmistakably local in its first logic.
One gate, three jobs
The insight was not that guards, residents or administrators were doing something foolish. It was that the medium connecting them had fallen behind the work. A phone tree can make three competent people look disorganized. A paper log can turn yesterday's certainty into today's archaeology. Munily treated the handoff itself as the problem.
“La comunicación boca a boca es la que mejor construye la lealtad del mercado de startups.”Khaled Alhaj on earning customer loyalty
Four founders, no polite fog
Munily's founding table also has a family seat. Marwa Hage is Alhaj's sister as well as a cofounder and revenue leader. Family businesses are often described in soft-focus language, all heritage and Sunday lunch. Hage's description is more useful. At work, she wrote, family goes into the background and Munily comes first. Their high degree of trust creates harder feedback, higher expectations and conversations with very little filter.
That candor extends to Mitchell Contreras, the company's technology cofounder. Hage once described a good cofounder as the person who notices when you cannot carry the ball and says, in effect, give it here. It is a homely image for a serious operating principle. Startups distribute uncertainty before they distribute success. Somebody must carry what another person drops, and ideally do it without preparing a courtroom argument about whose turn it was.
The picture of the team laughing on a boat is warmer than the operating reality it represents. Founding with a sibling does not remove conflict; it removes some of the ceremonial wrapping around it. Trust becomes a tool only if the team can spend it on specificity. What is broken? Who owns the repair? What does the customer need next? Affection may open the room, but clarity keeps the company inside it.
A Panama product learns to travel
By late 2021, Munily had raised a reported US$475,000 from a group that included Y Combinator, angel investors and Rappi cofounders. The company was preparing its move into Colombia, where apartment buildings and gated communities presented familiar coordination problems at a larger scale. In January 2022, that expansion became active. Later that year, Alhaj said Munily served 50,000 active users living in jointly managed properties.
The company's acceptance into Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch gave the Panama startup a Silicon Valley chapter without changing the plainness of its core job. Munily still had to help a real person get through a real gate. The useful abstraction was not “smart living,” a phrase spacious enough to park almost any gadget inside. It was reducing the time between a request and a trustworthy response.
That focus also explains Alhaj's preference for direct customer communication and word of mouth. Residential software enters a web of trust. Administrators talk to administrators. Boards compare notes. Residents feel a product's quality in minutes, usually when they are in a hurry. A recommendation from a neighboring community says something a polished campaign cannot: this works on a Tuesday.
Residents in the system
The gate gets eyes
Munily's product widened with the company. Communication and visitor registration led toward payments, financial administration, reservations and more automated access control. In 2024, Munily and Hikvision introduced Maia, combining community management with AI-assisted security technology. Facial recognition, plate reading and camera integration move the product closer to the physical threshold it had always organized from a distance.
Access technology carries a duty that convenience alone cannot settle. In Panama's public debate over data protection, Alhaj addressed how Munily handles identity information and emphasized that a photographed ID is not the only route through registration. A person who declines a photo should have another way to identify themselves. It is the right design question for this category: how does a system become faster without making consent feel like an inconvenient button?
There is a broader tension here. The better software becomes at seeing, the more disciplined its operator must become about what it should notice. A gate is both a service point and a boundary. The product has to recognize that distinction even when the sales brochure is impatient to call everything seamless.
Recognition, then the repair list
In 2025, Alhaj and Hage were included in the first Forbes 30 Under 30 Central America class, recognized in technology and innovation for Munily's work digitizing residential security across the region. The honor gave a neat frame to a story that had begun with untidy processes: missed calls, manual logs and people waiting for other people.
That same year, Alhaj completed Cohort 20 of the Latino Business Action Network's Business Scaling Program at Stanford Graduate School of Business. His public reflection did not read like a victory lap. He wrote about ambition, culture and the importance of finding “broken windows.” He credited mentor Ben Weeda with helping him see the issues holding Munily back from growth.
Scaling asks a company to do to itself what Munily does for a building: make the hidden handoffs visible.
The metaphor suits him. A broken window is a small defect with a large social shadow. Leave enough of them unattended and people begin to assume nobody owns the place. In a company, the equivalent may be an unclear decision, a slow customer response or a meeting that exists because the previous meeting failed. None looks dramatic. Together they become the culture.
Alhaj's next chapter is pointed outward and inward at once. Munily has signaled an interest in the United States while continuing to build across Latin America. The company is also looking for investment and cooperation beyond its original markets. Yet expansion only works if the internal operating system can travel with the product. New geography magnifies every good habit and every neglected window.
There is something nicely circular in the assignment. Alhaj began by noticing that residential communities were full of capable people trapped inside weak coordination. Now, as a CEO, he faces the founder's version of the same puzzle: how to keep a growing group aligned while the number of doors, decisions and expectations multiplies.
The ficus in the lobby may never know who fixed the waiting. That is often the fate of good operational software. It enters with a pitch deck and disappears into the day. The visitor arrives, the resident taps, the guard sees the answer, and nobody has to discuss the system at all. For the person at the gate, that silence is the feature.