cairo
(3)
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.
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.