I bought my company back because the story wasn't finished.

Most founder stories have one arc. Mine has three.

The build (2004 – 2022)

My first company was Luxor Instruments, founded in 2004 while I was still an engineering student at Minia University. A small operation in Upper Egypt building self-service internet kiosks for the Nile cruise boats running between Luxor and Aswan. The lesson that landed early: a good product is not enough on its own. What makes a company work is the team that grows with it.

Then more than fifteen years in semiconductor engineering — cryptographic hardware in Riyadh, then Silicon Vision in Cairo's Sheraton Valley (IP portfolio later acquired by Synopsys), then ARM Holdings in Cambridge. The infrastructure mindset I learned designing chip IP turned out to be the one customer experience was missing.

In 2016, I founded Tactful in Cairo with Mohammad Fouad Hassan, while still at ARM. Over the next six years we built a CX infrastructure platform from scratch: 60+ engineers, $5M+ in R&D, enterprise customers across MENA including Elaraby Group, valU, Fairmont, and Address Hotels. We didn't build a chatbot. We built the five-layer stack beneath every customer interaction.

The sale (2022 – 2024)

Destiny (later rebranded Dstny), a European business communications group, acquired Tactful. The partnership brought European distribution, enterprise credibility, and a perspective I could not have gained from the inside. By the end of it, I knew what Tactful's next chapter needed: full founder autonomy to pursue the agentic CX vision.

Coming back (early 2024 – present)

In early 2024, Mohammad and I reacquired full ownership. In February 2026, we closed a $1M Pre-Series A. The platform is seeing 100x growth. We are building with the clarity that only comes from having done it once before.

“I bought it back because the best version of it hadn't been built yet.”

The CX industry has a tool problem, not a technology problem. Everyone has AI. Almost nobody has infrastructure beneath it. That is the gap I keep coming back to, and it is why I spent more than eight years and $5M building what most companies try to buy off the shelf.

AI should handle the volume. People should handle the judgment. The platform's job is to know which is which, and to make that decision cleanly in every single interaction.

And this gets built from Cairo, not in spite of Cairo. The talent here is extraordinary; world-class technology gets built where people stop looking for it.