Startups Arabia Ali Zewail

Rama Kayyali is CEO and co-founder of Little Thinking Minds, an award-winning edtech company with a mission to close Arabic language literacy gaps, creating digital learning platforms to improve targeting over 100 million children in MENA and over 100 million globally. Currently Little Thinking Minds platforms are used by half a million students in 800 schools in 10 countries in the MENA region in private and public schools as well as schools that cater to refugee communities.

Little Thinking Minds is a multiple globally recognized and award winning company:
2023 winner of the Innovation Award from the Saudi eLearning Center
2022 MIT SOLVE global competition
2021 Innovation Award of Abdel Hamid Shoman Foundation
2020 and 2021 Elite 200 (GSVCup Competition) representing the top “Pre-K to Gray” EdTech startups across the globe with a mission to ensure that children have access to a better future through education
2019 Selected as one of the top 100 start-ups shaping the fourth industrial revolution
2019 Queen Rania Award for Education in Entrepreneurship

Rama is an Eisenhower Fellow, an Endeavor Entrepreneur and winner of the Arab Women's Award.
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The Startups Arabia Podcast connects you to the most prominent founders, investors, and operators of the Arab region. You will be inspired by their success, the challenges they overcame and the opportunities they see.
Follow us on our social media platforms to stay updated and get in touch:
LinkedIn: Startups Arabia Podcast
Twitter: @ArabiaStartups
Facebook: @startupsarabia
Youtube: Startups Arabia Podcast
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Rama’s LinkedIn account: @Rama Kayyali
Little Thinking Minds’ Website: https://www.littlethinkingminds.com/en/

Wael is a Computer Engineer, serial entrepreneur, and YC alumnus who has co-founded various startups in the Silicon Valley and the Middle East. He was one of the early employees of Careem and held roles including VP of Product Management and VP of Platform Superapp Business Unit until Uber's acquisition for $3.1bn. Wael is a techie at heart and has built technology products used by tens of millions of users worldwide. He is currently a General Partner at Raed Ventures​, a VC firm ​investing in early stage startups in the region​,​ and is passionate about building tech capacity and fostering entrepreneurship in the MENA region.
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The Startups Arabia Podcast connects you to the most prominent founders, investors, and operators of the Arab region. You will be inspired by their success, the challenges they overcame and the opportunities they see.
Follow us on our social media platforms to stay updated and get in touch:
LinkedIn: Startups Arabia Podcast
Twitter: @ArabiaStartups
Facebook: @startupsarabia
Youtube: Startups Arabia Podcast
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Wael’s LinkedIn account: @Wael Nafee
Raed Ventures’ Website: https://raed.vc/

Dr. Waleed Kadous is Chief Scientist at Anyscale, the company behind the popular open source distributed computing platform Ray. He leads the company’s LLM efforts. Prior to Anyscale, Waleed worked at Uber, where he led overall system architecture, evangelized machine learning, and led the Location and Maps teams. He previously worked at Google, where he founded the Android Location and Sensing team, responsible for the “blue dot” as well as ML algorithms underlying products like Google Fit. He also holds more than 40 patents. 
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The Startups Arabia Podcast connects you to the most prominent founders, investors, and operators of the Arab region. You will be inspired by their success, the challenges they overcame and the opportunities they see.
Follow us on our social media platforms to stay updated and get in touch:
LinkedIn: Startups Arabia Podcast
Twitter: @ArabiaStartups
Facebook: @startupsarabia
Youtube: Startups Arabia Podcast
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Waleed’s LinkedIn account: @M Waleed Kadous
Anyscale’s Website: https://www.anyscale.com/
Ray: https://docs.ray.io/en/latest/

Asher Siddiqui is a tech investor with a global career spanning 25+ years, having made 100+ investments valued at $15bn+.
Asher is a General Partner at Sukna Ventures, a MENA focused early-stage VC Fund that backs exceptional teams building the software & data infrastructure layer enabling the digital transformation of industries across the MENA region.
Asher started out in the late 90’s as an entrepreneur and software engineer building J2EE B2B SaaS products (1998-2006), followed by 10 years (2006-2016) in corporate M&A, as Head of M&A and CVC at Etisalat Group (now e& Group - c.$65bn market cap) where he led $15bn of M&A and CVC (founding board member and chair of the IC at iMENA Group) deals and then switched to VC when he joined the global leadership team at 500 Startups (now 500 Global) in San Francisco (2016-2019).
Since then, Asher was involved with the development of several VC firms including Sukna Ventures in the MENA region, Lumikai Fund in India, Zayn Capital in Pakistan, Race Capital in Silicon Valley, etc..
Asher Siddiqui is also a GP coach and advisor to several VC fund managers (GP’s) and sits on the advisory board of several VC firms, including: FootPrint Coalition Ventures (led by Robert Downey Jr. - USA), Merus Capital (led by the former Head of Corp Dev at Google - USA), The Treasury (led by the cofounders of Betterment and Acorns - USA), among others. 
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The Startups Arabia Podcast connects you to the most prominent founders, investors, and operators of the Arab region. You will be inspired by their success, the challenges they overcame and the opportunities they see.
Follow us on our social media platforms to stay updated and get in touch:
LinkedIn: Startups Arabia Podcast
Twitter: @ArabiaStartups
Facebook: @startupsarabia
Youtube: Startups Arabia Podcast
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Asher's LinkedIn account: @Asher Siddiqui
Sukna Ventures’ Website: https://suknaventures.com/

Asher Siddiqui is a tech investor with a global career spanning 25+ years, having made 100+ investments valued at $15bn+.
Asher is a General Partner at Sukna Ventures, a MENA focused early-stage VC Fund that backs exceptional teams building the software & data infrastructure layer enabling the digital transformation of industries across the MENA region.
Asher started out in the late 90’s as an entrepreneur and software engineer building J2EE B2B SaaS products (1998-2006), followed by 10 years (2006-2016) in corporate M&A, as Head of M&A and CVC at Etisalat Group (now e& Group - c.$65bn market cap) where he led $15bn of M&A and CVC (founding board member and chair of the IC at iMENA Group) deals and then switched to VC when he joined the global leadership team at 500 Startups (now 500 Global) in San Francisco (2016-2019).
Since then, Asher was involved with the development of several VC firms including Sukna Ventures in the MENA region, Lumikai Fund in India, Zayn Capital in Pakistan, Race Capital in Silicon Valley, etc..
Asher Siddiqui is also a GP coach and advisor to several VC fund managers (GP’s) and sits on the advisory board of several VC firms, including: FootPrint Coalition Ventures (led by Robert Downey Jr. - USA), Merus Capital (led by the former Head of Corp Dev at Google - USA), The Treasury (led by the cofounders of Betterment and Acorns - USA), among others. 
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The Startups Arabia Podcast connects you to the most prominent founders, investors, and operators of the Arab region. You will be inspired by their success, the challenges they overcame and the opportunities they see.
Follow us on our social media platforms to stay updated and get in touch:
LinkedIn: Startups Arabia Podcast
Twitter: @ArabiaStartups
Facebook: @startupsarabia
Youtube: Startups Arabia Podcast
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Asher's LinkedIn account: @Asher Siddiqui
Sukna Ventures’ Website: https://suknaventures.com/

Ismael Belkhayat is the CEO and cofounder of Chari. He’s a serial founder who is a notable figure in the Moroccan tech ecosystem. After his time in consulting at the Boston Consulting Group, Ismael founded two companies that would kickstart his entrepreneurial career: the Venture Builder Wib.co, a startup studio, and VotreChauffeur, a leading ground transportation company in Morocco later acquired by Avis Car Rental. After gaining significant traction and recognition, Ismael went on to found Sarouty, a marketplace that facilitates real estate deals, helping people to rent or buy property across Morocco.
Within two years, Sarouty became the leading real estate platform in the country and partnered with Propertyfinder, a prop-tech startup, to scale its tech and expand to additional locations.
White serving as a Board Member for all of his previous ventures, Ismael was inspired to start his most recent company to address digital transformation in the consumer-packaged goods category. In 2020, Ismael and his wife co-founded Chari, a B2B e-commerce fintech app for retailers. Leaning on his deep expertise in logistics and marketplace, Ismael has grown Chari in size, users, and markets. Chari has succeeded in making its mark as a “Disruptor of the Year”, an award from the Africa CEO Forum, and shows positive signs of a potential unicorn status (a first for Morocco).
Ismael has a proven track record of driving business development and solution-focused ventures, and we look forward to watching where his vision and ingenuity take him next!
Want to know more?
https://techcabal.com/2022/01/21/after-two-exits-ismael-belkhayats-new-startup-is-now-worth-100m/
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The Startups Arabia Podcast connects you to the most prominent founders, investors, and operators of the Arab region. You will be inspired by their success, the challenges they overcame and the opportunities they see.
Follow us on our social media platforms to stay updated and get in touch:
LinkedIn: Startups Arabia Podcast
Twitter: @ArabiaStartups
Facebook: @startupsarabia
Youtube: Startups Arabia Podcast

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Ismael’s LinkedIn account: @Ismael Belkhayat
Chari’s Website: https://chari.co/