cairo
(5)
Pylon
Pylon is a Cairo-based smart infrastructure platform that sells electricity and water utilities a subscription-based Smart Metering as a Service (SMaaS). Its software layers on top of any meter - old or new - to cut losses, improve revenue collection and give operators real-time visibility, all at zero upfront cost. Founded in 2017 and backed by Y Combinator (S21), Pylon runs across more than a million metering endpoints in Egypt and the Philippines.
Cartridge
Cartridge is an onchain gaming infrastructure company building the tools and platform that let studios ship fully onchain games and autonomous worlds. It leads development of Dojo, an open-source engine and toolchain for provable games on Starknet, and pairs it with the Cartridge Controller (a game-native smart contract wallet using passkeys, session keys and a paymaster) and Slot, a rollup-as-a-service execution layer. The goal is to give players real ownership of in-game economies while keeping onboarding as smooth as a traditional game.
Tarrence Van As
Tarrence Van As is the co-founder and CEO of Cartridge, a New York-based company building the infrastructure for fully onchain games. Cartridge leads development of Dojo, an open-source toolchain for provable games and autonomous worlds on Starknet, alongside Controller, a passkey-based smart contract wallet, and Slot, a rollup-as-a-service for game developers. A University of Michigan computer science engineer who bought his first Bitcoin in 2013 and shipped Ethereum smart contracts by 2015, Tarrence previously worked on mixed reality at Magic Leap before helping build the Dope Wars NFT ecosystem and founding Cartridge in 2022. In August 2024 the company raised a $7.5M Series A led by BITKRAFT Ventures.
SOKNA
SOKNA is Egypt's first end-to-end funeral services platform, handling everything a grieving family would otherwise have to chase down themselves - burial permits and paperwork, body preparation, cemetery setup, transportation, funeral hall booking, obituaries, personalized sadaqa giveaways and post-loss support - for both Muslim and Christian families, 24/7. Founded by former Google and Facebook engineer Ahmed Gaballah, who left Silicon Valley to build it, SOKNA runs technology quietly in the background (dispatching, demand prediction, data tracking) while keeping the human-facing experience calm. Since launching in 2019-2020 it has organized more than 2,500 funerals, partnered with 20+ hospitals and 70+ vendors across Greater Cairo, and raised a $1M seed round.
Ahmed Gaballah
Ahmed Gaballah is the founder and CEO of SOKNA, Egypt's first end-to-end funeral services platform. After 16 years in California building products at Google, Adobe and Facebook, he returned to Cairo in 2019 to fix one of the messiest, most painful logistics problems anyone ever faces: burying a loved one. SOKNA handles paperwork, body preparation, transport, cemetery setup, condolence halls and repatriation, and has grown into a profitable operation serving families across every Egyptian governorate, with a cemetery project and international expansion now in motion.