deathtech
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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.
Daniel Shaw
Daniel Shaw is the co-founder and CEO of Autumn, a New York-based end-of-life marketplace built to help bereaved families navigate the legal, financial, emotional and logistical mess that follows a death. A medical school dropout turned 15-year creative technologist (Director of Digital Accounts at Wieden+Kennedy), Shaw lost a string of close family members over a decade and was appalled by how disorganized and unhelpful the deathcare industry was. So he aggregated more than 500,000 local providers, wrote free guides, and set out to let people manage death the same way they manage life - under the banner 'We make loss more livable.'