Iliana Montauk

Iliana Montauk is the Co-Founder and CEO of Manara, a social-impact edtech platform that connects software engineers from the Middle East and North Africa with global tech jobs at companies like Google, Meta, and Amazon. A Harvard grad and Fulbright Fellow who speaks five languages, she built Gaza's first startup accelerator before co-founding Manara with Laila Abudahi in 2020. Backed by Y Combinator, Stripe, Reid Hoffman, and Paul Graham, Manara has trained engineers who achieve 86% job placement within five months, and in 2025 inked a $3.6M AWS partnership to upskill 2,500 engineers in cloud and AI — on a mission to reach 1 million learners by 2027.