cairo
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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.
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.