Abdulhamid Haidar is the founder and CEO of Darsel, a nonprofit that teaches K-12 math over text messages. Instead of apps and video that assume reliable Wi-Fi, Darsel runs entirely on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and SMS, using AI-powered adaptive algorithms to tutor students in Jordan, India and Nigeria. Built during the 2020 COVID lockdown by a Syrian-American who grew up in a family of teachers, Darsel has had more than 120,000 students answer over 170 million math questions. Haidar holds degrees from MIT, Harvard Kennedy School and Stanford's Graduate School of Business, and previously spent three years at McKinsey. His goal: meaningfully reach 100 million students by 2030.
Maen Mahfoud is the founder and CEO of Replate, a technology-driven food rescue organization he started in 2016 while studying molecular biology at UC Berkeley. Raised in Syria, where his mother sent him out on his bike to deliver the family's surplus lunch to neighbors in need, he came to California to study medicine and instead built a logistics-and-software platform that dispatches drivers to collect leftover food from businesses and route it to nonprofits. Replate has recovered millions of pounds of surplus food, served hundreds of community organizations, and counts Netflix, Walmart, Amazon, Chipotle, and Slack among its corporate donors. He is a 2023 James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award recipient and a DRK entrepreneur.

Bassel Ojjeh is the CEO and co-founder of LigaData, a Menlo Park-based data platform company specializing in AI-powered telecom analytics and big data infrastructure. A Syrian-American serial entrepreneur, Ojjeh previously co-founded digiMine (behavioral targeting pioneer, later Audience Science), DMX Group (acquired by Yahoo, where he served as SVP), and nPario (big data platform). He also co-founded Syria's first English-language private university and SYNC, the first international tech conference held in Syria in 50 years, working to bridge Silicon Valley with Damascus.