Hassan Al Shouli is a senior communications and strategic business executive at Microsoft's CEMA (Central Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa) President Office, based in the UAE. With nearly two decades of career experience, he has shaped Microsoft's presence across the Gulf, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and broader MEA region through executive communications, multi-channel campaigns, and leadership engagement. Before Microsoft, he spent years in the fast-moving MENA digital market at dubizzle and analytics consultancies. He holds an MBA from Cass Business School (now Bayes) and a BSc in Electronics, Engineering, and Communications from the Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport.
Mahmoud Abdelkader is the Egyptian-American co-founder of Very Good Security (VGS), a San Francisco-based data security platform that raised $105 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Goldman Sachs, and Visa. Born near the Suez Canal and raised in Brooklyn, he built high-frequency trading systems at Wachovia, was employee #4 at Milo.com before its $75M eBay acquisition, then co-founded Balanced Payments through Y Combinator (W11) before founding VGS in 2016. VGS pioneered the 'Zero Data' category of data security as a service, serving 700+ customers including Fortune 100 companies. He stepped down as CEO in late 2022 and now invests in fintech companies including Ramp, Vercel, Alloy, Mercury, and Stytch while experimenting with AI.
Osama Elkady is the Co-Founder and CEO of Incorta, an enterprise data platform that eliminates the traditional ETL pipeline by mapping directly to systems of record for real-time analytics. After 20 years at Oracle - where he rose from junior engineer to VP of Applications Development and invented XML Publisher - he co-founded Incorta in 2014 with the conviction that businesses deserve instant access to their data. The company has since raised $192.6 million in total funding, counts Broadcom, Starbucks, and Hormel Foods among its enterprise clients, and has been recognized for delivering sub-second analytics at massive scale.
Ahmed Kamel is a Cairo-born, San Francisco-based serial tech entrepreneur and Google Developer Expert in Machine Learning. He is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sinai.ai, an AI-native book platform that transforms static books into interactive, personalized reading experiences via its patented aiBook™ format. A 20-year software veteran, Kamel previously co-founded YOUXEL Technology (2011) and adam.ai (2017), an AI-powered meeting management platform that attracted Atlassian investment and grew 5x during COVID-19. In April 2026, Sinai.ai closed a $1.45M pre-seed round led by KAUST Innovation Ventures and DisrupTech Ventures.
Mohamed Elgendy is the Co-Founder and CEO of Kolena, a San Francisco-based AI testing and validation platform that raised $21M to help enterprises build reliable, trustworthy AI systems. An Egyptian-American technologist and author of the widely-read 'Deep Learning for Vision Systems' (Manning Publications, 20,000+ copies sold), Elgendy cut his teeth building AI/ML organizations at Amazon, Twilio, Rakuten, and Synapse (acquired by Palantir) before founding Kolena in 2021. His mission: bring software engineering rigor - unit testing, regression analysis, scenario-level validation - to a field that has long relied on aggregate accuracy scores that mask real-world failures.
Ali Abouelatta is an Egyptian-born product manager turned newsletter writer and founder who built First 1000 - a deep-dive Substack publication dissecting how famous startups acquired their first 1,000 customers - from zero to 90,000+ subscribers in under three years with no prior audience. After a stint at Duolingo where he generated an estimated $50-100M in incremental revenue through monetization experiments, he left in 2025 to build Lazyweb.com, an AI-powered design inspiration library, documenting his own journey to 1,000 paying customers in real time through the very newsletter that made him known.
Yasser Elsaid is an Egyptian-born software engineer and entrepreneur who bootstrapped Chatbase - an AI agent platform - from zero to $9M ARR with 18 people, all without raising a dollar of VC funding. He launched to 16 Twitter followers in February 2023, the tweet went viral, he failed two university classes, turned down a $1M acquisition offer for his source code three months in, and kept building. Now based in San Francisco on an O-1 'Alien of Extraordinary Ability' visa, he's declared 2026 the year Chatbase forgets it's bootstrapped.