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

My name is Yassin Asfour, and I’m the co-founder and CEO of Byte+, a healthtech company that aims to democratize preventative healthcare by delivering tailored, data-driven health programs to organizations, empowering their employees to achieve healthier lifestyles through engaging, gamified experiences.

More than 80% of deaths in Egypt are caused by preventative chronic illnesses — diabetes, hypertension, heart disease. White-collar workers face a larger risk of death due to a sedentary lifestyle. We provide our services to these employees through companies, detecting important biomarkers, decoding them through a clinical team, and transforming people through highly personalized plans. We bring the lab to their doorstep, running blood tests and body composition scans, integrating wearables to monitor heart rate, sleep, and movement, and give our clinical team — made up of medical doctors, nutritionists, and physiotherapists — access to this data to create personalized meal plans, supplement protocols, and exercise routines tailored for each person. Best of all, it’s gamified, so employees get to compete to achieve their goals — exercise, calories, recovery, and sleep.

Healthcare in general is a reactive practice. What we’re trying to do with Byte+ is turn it into a proactive one — we shouldn’t be waiting until we get sick to improve our health. Our service does the screenings to catch problems before they arise. We collect several data points through our wearables, like heart rate during the day and heart rate during sleep. With one employee, we realized that his sleep heart rate was unusually high, and referred him to a cardiologist — turns out he has a heart problem. If the condition had gone undetected for another few years, he could have had a heart attack.

On the contrary, traditional health insurance waits for you to get ill, and then offers treatment. This costs the government a lot. It costs companies who pay for healthcare a lot. And of course, it costs individuals and their families a lot. That’s the case for preventative healthcare — we start early instead of waiting for the problem to occur.

I didn’t figure out what I needed to do to enter the market — it was pure coincidence. While working in fashion retail at the family business, we were trying to introduce incentives beyond pay to attract good talent, so we introduced a wellness program to take care of people physically and mentally. We told 30 people to download apps to track their steps, calories, and sleep quality, and they’d report it on a Google Sheet. It was very primitive at first, but the engagement levels were amazing. Within one hour of opening a second cohort, all 30 spaces were filled. People volunteered. 60 became 90, and 90 became 120. When we found that people were happy with it and we saw real improvements, we started thinking about offering it to other companies. The hook was gamification — have people enjoy the first step, and the science followed.

We don’t have traditional competition locally — but that’s not a good thing. Competition confirms market existence. While we do have regional competition, we’re defining a new category in Egypt based on a firm belief that the future of health is preventative, and that healthcare professionals will need patient data in real-time to proactively assist patients. We’re trying to build a tech stack for patients and a health platform for doctors to manage people’s lives. If we can build something good for these doctors — which we have — we believe we can offer it to healthcare professionals in the market.

I knew we were successful when body composition scans came out from the very first batch, and the majority of participants improved muscle mass, lost visceral fat — which is highly correlated with chronic disease — or both, as well as showing improvements in sleep scores. People’s step counts improved by more than 50%. When people started accusing each other of cheating — tying their watches to fans to count steps, or giving their children their wearables to track higher activity — we knew that engagement was good. But on a personal level, I felt successful when an employee told me they prayed for me because of the impact we had not just on them but on their family. That was deeply touching, and made me feel like we were doing something bigger than we imagined.

In five years, I see us as a primary layer between healthcare and patients. We will become an essential component of data and insight transfer between medical teams and patients. Or individuals in society, not just patients, because the whole point is to optimize people’s health and prevent disease. This will be achieved when we’re able to perfect our ability to provide clear value to end users — whether patients or athletes — and to healthcare professionals in managing their clients. We’re using AI to synthesize information into insights so doctors don’t have to spend an enormous amount of time reading thousands of reports.

There are things I’d be keen to change about the healthcare industry: First, shift the emphasis away from fast profit. The health industry is very profit-driven—hospitals, pharmaceuticals. There has to be incentive alignment between the health sector and individuals, which doesn’t exist today.

Second, change the system from reactive to proactive. For example, Egypt has some of the highest diabetes levels in the world, even in young children. If we could find affordable continuous glucose monitors and give them to people with diabetes, prediabetes, or potential risk, doctors could see the spikes and advise on how to eat, sleep, and move before it becomes a real problem. This device might cost a few thousand pounds, but if you’re diabetic, imagine what you’ll pay to treat complications — or worse, the impact on your family if you suffer or die.

Third, address the bureaucracy of data flow. We’re working with very sensitive data, and privacy and sensitivity protocols are essential, but if regulatory authorities make it too complicated, it becomes difficult for any player in the market to innovate. You have to build infrastructure that protects data while enabling progress.

The technical challenges — how to collect, structure, simplify, and synthesize data so the end user can understand it — are all manageable. The hardest part of my job is that I have ADHD. Especially nowadays, managing hyper-distractions is such an immense battle. I try to look with clarity at where I want to be in five years and try to solve problems amid all the distractions. It’s a very tough battle to manage. I’m very thankful for my team — the fact that they’re able to manage this madness and redirect me without demoralizing me is wonderful. I’m very grateful to them.

I have my wife to thank for helping me balance home and business, because I’m not entirely sure I’m doing it at all. When you’re building a business, you’re constantly compromising bits of every dimension. I do try to dedicate my mornings to spending time with my wife and son, but if I’m successful at that, it’s my wife that’s to thank, not me.

The last book I read was The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter. It argues that modern life has systematically removed all forms of struggle — physical, mental, and environmental — leaving us weaker, more stressed, and increasingly prone to lifestyle-related diseases. Problem-solving has been reduced by navigation apps and AI. Our current life is designed to make everything immediately available and accessible at the touch of a button — no movement required.

Our ancestors moved 14 times the amount we move today. You lose your brain’s neuro-plasticity when you’re not exercising mentally and physically. This is very important to me because we’re on a mission to reverse these health issues. We’re trying to help people and companies move, sleep better, and rewire their brains. The key here is shifting from instant gratification to delayed gratification. This is how our ancestors lived — they didn’t have everything they wanted immediately, they had to wait and work very hard to get it.

If I weren’t the brain behind Byte+, I would definitely be supporting my family — whether through my mother’s or father’s side of the business. I’ve always felt a moral duty toward them. If not that, I’d be on an island, eating farm-to-table food, producing music, and designing furniture — rising with the sun and resting at sunset. But I’ll leave that dream for heaven.

If I could tell my younger self one thing when it comes to setting up this business, it would be: Start early. Fail fast. And knock on as many doors as you can — you’d be surprised by the amount of good behind any of these doors, and it could be one you don’t expect to open. I knocked on a door which I thought was completely locked, and it turned out to be one of the biggest surprises and blessings.

If I could give young entrepreneurs a piece of advice, it would be gritty. Be very gritty. Entrepreneurship is one of the toughest mental games you can ever play. It requires resilience and unwavering faith in your cause. Grit is a combination of perseverance and long-term passion — it has to be something you’re very confident in and will work hard to reach. Second, be very, very quick, not because of competition, but so you can learn fast. You can learn something everyday, and most entrepreneurs I’ve met always say we could have learned faster, we could have taken these steps faster. And third, be super humble, because sometimes you think you’ve made it, and find out quickly that there’s still a lot to learn. But with this humility, don’t lose your confidence. I love saying it because I need to hear it more than anyone.

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