How a Houston funeral director quietly rolled up thousands of family-owned parlors into a $4.3 billion machine - and made its biggest money on funerals nobody has died for yet.
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.