OUR FOUNDER OF THE WEEK– Every Tuesday, Founder of the Week looks at how a successful member of Egypt’s startup community got their big break, asks about their experiences running a business, and gets their advice for budding entrepreneurs. Speaking to us this week is Mohy Aboualam (LinkedIn), co-founder and CEO at Darwinz AI.

My name is Mohy Aboualam and I’m the co-founder and CEO of Darwinz AI. We specialize in AI services geared towards leveraging data as a primary asset for businesses — offering both ready-made tools and customized solutions, ultimately adding significant value to our clients operations. I graduated from Imperial College London with a Masters of Engineering and began my career in the UK before returning to Egypt.

My interest in AI and entrepreneurship started with my thesis that was based on the use of AI. I researched how to combine different food ingredients that would taste good together based on thousands of recipes online using an AI machine model. When I graduated, I joined private consultancy firm Mott Macdonald, where I did tech consulting. I enjoyed it, but unfortunately the role didn’t involve enough AI and data science — it was more technology focused alongside some software development.

This prompted me to make a switch and come back to Egypt. I was going to join Vodafone’s AI and data science team where the vice president of Vodafone and team head of AI team Emad Al Azhary was about to leave. Instead of joining Vodafone, Emad and I, along with our third partner, Glint Ventures Studio, decided to create Darwinz AI.

We’re an AI company and a Google Cloud Build partner as well. We’re authenticated by Google to build data solutions and AI solutions for businesses, specifically our flagship product Dida — a platform that helps retail and hospitality businesses such as beauty salons like El Sagheer, restaurants like Crave, Mori Sushi, Tabali, Mongini’s, and hotels. These different B2C businesses want to understand their customers’ journey better, increase their sales, upsell certain items, cut their expenses, or operate more efficiently.

Before Dida, businesses simply stored orders in their point-of-sale systems for financial and tax purposes, neglecting the wealth of data it contained. Dida integrates with these systems, syncing transactions in real-time and leveraging AI to provide actionable insights. This includes optimizing pricing, improving customer experience, creating product combos, managing peak hours, and reducing food waste.

Our latest feature, Dida GPT, offers an intuitive app interface for non-tech-savvy users to access these insights through conversational AI via an app on Apple Store or Google PlayStore. They can ask about sales trends, product combinations, and trending ingredients globally. This breakthrough solution utilizes AI to unlock business opportunities and address operational challenges in retail and hospitality. By harnessing unstructured data, we provide clear visibility and proactive suggestions, transforming businesses from reactive to proactive.

My advice when starting your own business is to pick the right co-founders and teammates to make sure that everyone brings their own special sauce to the mix. I’m very grateful for my co-founders: Emad, who brings extensive experience in AI, data science, and corporate leadership, and Glint Ventures Studio who have a background in consulting and startup building. Their combined experiences and expertise enriches our team.

But building your own business means bidding corporate stability goodbye. The 9-to-5 job is stable and freeing because after 6pm you get to take your mind off things and the weekend is yours. But with startups, it’s not really like that. The satisfaction you get is from making our clients happy and actually getting real value-added from what we’re doing, as well as building the team. To me, this really compensates for what we gave up.

We have reached the hyper-growth phase in our business which needs investment. We are currently bootstrapped, but we feel it is high time to get investments for several reasons: We have paying clients, over 90% customer retention, which translates to our customers renewing their membership with us year on year. For funding, we are looking to partner with the right accelerators or funds that are strategic and can help us with our goals for regional expansion and building a commercial team in each of these markets.

We plan to grow in Egypt and create the right partnerships, as well as expanding aggressively in the region. We’re in talks with some of the biggest multinationals about partnering for our products. This comes alongside educating the market on how to use AI and how we can benefit them. Darwinz AI is also rolling out the tech to the partnering companies as we are working with them on strengthening their sales force teams.

When it comes to local startups, I believe their biggest strength is their number: There are a lot of people who aspire to build their own companies and work on their own projects. All of the resources that help entrepreneurs are also becoming much more feasible.

The last great thing I’ve listened to was Moghamra, a podcast by one of my friends that talks to different founders and people in the entrepreneurial space. I found their experiences very relatable and educational. But music, and my dog Benji, are my passion (despite growing up with a phobia of dogs). When it comes to music, I listen to everything from R&B, Louis Armstrong, Led Zeppelin, Scorpions, The Weeknd, Lana Del Rey — my music taste is all over the place.

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