Omar Shoukry Sakr arrived in Berlin with the wrong picture in his head. A company, he thought, ought to look substantial: large buildings, a serious entrance, the reassuring architecture of an established career. His placement offered three laboratories and fourteen employees. He would be number fifteen. The place had rather fewer corridors than his expectations required.
“It was below my expectations,” he recalled. Then he began working there. The small team put him close to colleagues across the business, giving him a view of decisions and responsibilities that a larger organisation might have kept out of sight. He came to appreciate the experiments involved in building a company alongside the experiments happening at the bench.
That encounter helps explain the founder he became. Sakr had trained for a scientific career. He would go on to build Nawah Scientific, a company organised around an unusually practical proposition: researchers should be able to obtain laboratory work without first acquiring a laboratory. An expensive instrument could stay exactly where it was. The people able to use its capabilities could be much further away.
A business built between flights
His education began in Egypt. He graduated in pharmacy from Ain Shams University in 2005, completed a master’s degree at the German University in Cairo in 2009, and pursued his doctorate at the University of Geneva. He finished the PhD in 2015. An executive MBA at Hult International Business School followed, with graduation in 2018. The sequence joined two demanding forms of education: learning how to investigate a question and learning how to keep an organisation running.
Geneva gave him a comparison he could carry home. There, the range of scientific equipment available to researchers was striking. Egypt had trained scientists, including people who wanted to return after studying abroad, but access to facilities could limit the work they could undertake. Sakr saw an opportunity in the distance between a researcher’s ability and the instruments within reach.
Building the answer initially required some distance of his own. While living in Switzerland, he spent weekdays in Geneva and returned to Egypt on weekends to work on Nawah. The arrangement continued for a year. A business described today through laboratories and international customers once depended on the distinctly less glamorous problem of its founder being in the right country at the right time.
Nawah launched in 2015. Its early team numbered four scientists. Family and friends supplied the first funding. There was no need to imagine an enormous research campus at the beginning; the company had to establish that people would pay to use the capabilities of a smaller one. Sakr had already learned in Berlin that the number of people in a building could be a poor measure of what happened inside it.
A laboratory, ordered differently
The name supplied a compact explanation. Nawah means nucleus in Arabic. Sakr’s idea was to gather equipment and scientific expertise in a central place, then make that concentration useful to people outside it. The business would do the work of connecting a question to an experiment, and an experiment to a result.
A researcher requests a service online. A sample is collected and taken to the laboratory. Scientists perform the analysis, and the results are returned digitally. The phrase “cloud lab” describes the access, while the laboratory remains reassuringly physical. Someone still has to receive the sample, operate the equipment and carry out the work. The internet has yet to persuade a vial to deliver itself.
“It’s like a shopping experience. And it works like magic.” That was Sakr’s description of the customer journey. Behind the convenient front end sits a combination of people, instruments and logistics. Each part has to work for the convenience to mean anything. A tidy online questionnaire is of limited comfort if the sample never reaches the bench.
The model changes the purchase a researcher has to make. Buying a machine brings obligations beyond its price: a place to put it, people who know how to use it, and the continuing work of keeping it useful. A service allows the customer to commission the work required for a particular question. That distinction is central to understanding why Sakr’s company exists.
Nawah’s customers expanded beyond individual researchers into businesses, including food and agriculture. Its work could contribute to something as familiar as the nutritional information on a cereal packet. Such an example brings the laboratory down to breakfast-table scale. Scientific infrastructure can sound remote until it produces information someone reads while looking for the milk.
Teaching investors a new subject
Finding customers was only part of Sakr’s task. He also had to explain the business to investors accustomed to other kinds of companies. An unfamiliar category makes evaluation harder: what should its growth look like, what should it cost to expand, and which other business offers a useful comparison? His scientific training did not automatically supply the answers an investment committee wanted.
Recognition arrived through several different doors. At the Africa 2017 Forum, Sakr won an elevator pitch prize after being selected among eighteen startups and entrepreneurs. The award provided access to a training programme at Stanford Business School. The scientist was collecting another kind of education, this time by making his company understandable within the limits of a pitch.
That same year, Nawah won the RiseUp pitch competition. The announced prize was a $50,000 investment from 500 Startups, subject to due diligence. The qualification matters: a competition announcement and completed investment are separate steps. Even so, the result placed a laboratory business in front of an audience looking for companies it could imagine growing.
In 2019, Sakr reached the inaugural Africa’s Business Heroes final in Accra. He placed second and received a $150,000 grant. Temie Giwa-Tubosun of LifeBank took first place, and Christelle Kwizera of Water Access Rwanda took third. Nawah was now being considered alongside founders building quite different businesses across the continent.
A company built around a nucleus was beginning to acquire a wider orbit.
FROM EGYPT TO A REGIONAL BUSINESS
The programme widened Sakr’s view of opportunities in Africa. That shift fits the work ahead of him: laboratory access is a problem that crosses borders, but a business must learn the practical conditions in each market. An award brings visibility and money. Turning a wider map into a working operation requires a different series of decisions.
The fundraising continued. In January 2021, Nawah announced a second pre-Series A round of $1 million, combining equity and debt. Cairo Angels Syndicate Fund announced its own investment in 2022. These were stages in a long build, with scientific equipment and a service organisation to support, rather than a single moment in which the future arrived fully financed.
The founder returns to class
Sakr’s public introduction contains a useful interruption to the professional credentials: he is a father of five and a self-described barbecue master. The latter title has considerably fewer letters after it than his academic qualifications, but suggests he is willing to claim authority beyond the laboratory. There are, evidently, other occasions for assembling people around specialised equipment.
Teaching has remained part of his working life. His biography includes lecturing in entrepreneurship at Zewail City of Science and Technology. In December 2025, Egypt University of Informatics described a session in which he helped students understand investor pitching. He discussed examples from his own journey, pitfalls founders encounter, and the value of clarity and evidence when presenting a business.
The return to a classroom is a fitting development for someone whose company began with a question about what scientists could reach. A founder who has spent years explaining an unfamiliar business has something practical to offer students preparing to explain their own. The exercise asks for a particular discipline: compress the experience without losing what makes it useful.
The next address on the sample label
Nawah marked ten years in December 2025 with a larger capital announcement: a $23 million Series A comprising equity and debt, led by Life Ventures Holding Group. The company reported more than one million samples tested, 160 researchers and customers in over thirty countries. Those figures describe the organisation at that announcement, a decade after its launch.
Company-reported figures · December 2025
The stated plans included a 10,000-square-metre research centre in Rwanda, doubled laboratory capacity in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and further expansion in North Africa and Europe. These were proposed uses of the capital. A building on a plan still needs to become a place where samples arrive and scientists can work.
By June 2026, Sakr was discussing the relationship between scientific ideas and viable businesses on the Business Bel Arabi podcast. It is a subject he has approached from several directions: as a researcher, an early founder, a pitch competitor and the leader of an expanding company. The vocabulary changes with the audience. The underlying question remains close to the one he brought back from Geneva.
Who gets to do the experiment? Sakr’s answer has taken the shape of a service, a team and a network of laboratories. In Berlin, a small company had challenged his expectations of where useful work could happen. He has spent the years since giving other researchers more places to begin.