🎫 OUR FOUNDER OF THE WEEK- 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 are Knot Technologies’ Ahmed Abdalla (LinkedIn), co-founder and CEO, and Hussein ElBendak (LinkedIn), co-founder and CTO.

Knot has just announced a USD 1 mn pre-seed round led by Cairo-based VC A15.

Our names are Ahmed Abdalla and Hussein ElBendak, and we’re the co-founders of Knot Technologies, a company that uses AI to combat fraudulent and black market ticket sales. We met 10 years ago in London as roommates.

We both studied computer science and mathematics at UCL. Hussein went on to work as a software engineer at Goldman Sachs and then Meta, mostly in e-commerce and advertising, where he worked on personalizing ads using AI. Ahmed completed a master’s in finance and private equity at the London School of Economics and interned at Bloomberg, Pimco, and UBS before landing his first full-time role in investment banking at Goldman Sachs. After two years there, he moved to Mubadala’s private equity team, covering healthcare and healthcare technology.

Knot was born out of our frustration with the ticketing industry. We both enjoyed attending football matches and concerts in London, where we experienced firsthand the ridiculously long virtual queues and rampant fake ticket sales that plague large events. It’s nearly impossible to get a ticket directly from the primary market because bots and professional resellers snap them up instantly. The market is fundamentally broken.

In 2024, we started researching. We spoke to football clubs in the UK and discovered that around 20% of stadium tickets are resold illegally for five to 10 times their face value. We could see a giant black hole sucking up bns of USD, and that it extended far beyond London.

Our solution uses AI to analyze people in the virtual queue and determine whether they’re bots or genuine fans. We help consumers access authentic tickets at fair prices, and we help business owners — football clubs, artists, venues — reclaim the revenue they deserve.

By early 2025, we had completed our research, quit our jobs, and moved back to Egypt to launch Knot. We briefly considered San Francisco, but Egypt made more sense since we wanted to cover the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Europe, not just the US. We also liked the idea of creating jobs here, where we have a strong engineering talent pool.

We now have 10 employees and around 50 clients in Egypt, where we’re focused on ticketing and WhatsApp solutions for large concerts and events. Egypt has seen — and will continue to see — significant growth in tourism, which goes hand in hand with growth in conferences and events. We’ve also signed clients in the UAE and UK, and hope to be fully operational in those markets by 2Q or 3Q 2026.

We were both fortunate to have the academic and professional experiences we gained abroad. Seeing how systems are built at scale at Meta really influenced how we approach Knot. Even when building our MVP, we had to think about how everything needs to work at scale while making sure we weren’t over-engineering and wasting time.

Our advice to startup founders: do the research early, and do more of it than you think you need. Speak to customers relentlessly. Speak to operators who’ve been in the industry for years and learn the edge cases, the incentives, and the real reasons systems look the way they do. Problems are rarely solved by a single clever feature — they’re solved by deep understanding, patient iteration, and a genuine hunger to keep asking “why” until you reach the root cause. Build from that level of insight, and you can design solutions that don’t just look good in theory, but actually change outcomes in the real world.

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