🤖🎬 OUR FOUNDER OF THE MONTH — Every month, Founder of the Month 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 Amall Askar (LinkedIn), founder and CEO of Arise Media.

My name is Amall Askar, founder and CEO of Arise Media, a company specializing in AI-powered production solutions in Egypt and the Middle East. We bring together directorial vision and advanced generative technologies to offer integrated solutions for artists, content creators, and production companies. Our focus is on helping creatives bring their ideas to life — particularly the complex ones that traditional budgets simply can’t accommodate — without compromising on artistic quality, while closing the gap between creative ambition and the prohibitive cost of production.

I studied Drama and Dramatic Criticism at the Faculty of Arts at Ain Shams University, graduating in 2020. That gave me a strong academic foundation in vision, storytelling, and dramatic structure for the screen. I started out independently, directing five short films that earned a number of local and international awards. Because films spend long periods doing the festival circuit before generating any return, I moved into corporate marketing — working in advertising and communications at large companies, moving up from graphic designer to video editor to director.

My interest in AI began as a solution to a production problem I’d been living with for years as a director. The dream of making my own film kept getting pushed back because of the cost of traditional shooting and production. When the first wave of AI arrived in 2023, my team and I made a deliberate decision to teach ourselves the tools early, and I decided to use them to finally make the film.

That turned out to be the turning point. The film earned first place in the CinemaTech competition organized by Gemini Africa at the Gouna Film Festival in 2024, with recognition from a jury that included Tarek El Ganainy, Nelly Karim, Mohamed Farag, and Amina Khalil. That’s when I realized that what started as a solution to a personal problem could become a solution for thousands of creatives and companies — and so I decided to found Arise as one of the first Egyptian companies specializing in AI-powered production.

Today, nearly three years in, we’ve built a client base that includes major companies and institutions — among them Orange, E&, Banque Misr, Cairo Bank, and Tesla Dubai. What I believe sets us apart isn’t simply using AI tools well — it’s our background in production and directing, which shows in the quality of what we deliver. We’re also committed to combining quality with speed and on-time delivery, which is the equation companies are looking for in advertising and media production.

Building the company wasn’t easy. Early on, we ran into the reality that many of the more advanced AI tools weren’t available in the Middle East at launch, which meant falling behind. I traveled to Dubai to access specialized training and the latest tools and licenses, so we could operate at the same level as global markets. Arabic presented its own challenge — most models were built for English-language content, while we needed to produce work that sounded natural in Egyptian and Gulf dialects, from lip sync to rhythm to pronunciation. It took months of experimentation and development before we arrived at results reliable enough for commercial advertising and production.

Through all of this, I found that the most misunderstood thing about AI is how it actually works. Some people treat it as a tool that produces finished results at the push of a button — but producing an ad or a short film at professional quality requires long hours of work and human intervention, from building the concept to fine-tuning the visual details to reviewing every scene until it reaches the standard required.

That’s why I don't believe AI will eliminate creative professions — but it will change the rules of competition. Everyone will learn the tools eventually. The real differentiator will remain the idea, the vision, and the ability to use technology in service of a clear goal, whether that’s an advertising campaign, a film, or a commercial project. What I think distinguishes me and Arise is our strong artistic background — we don’t treat this technology as a substitute for creativity, but as a tool for turning creativity into reality.

The business world wasn’t unfamiliar to me — I’d spent years working inside companies — but founding my own was an entirely different experience. I had to learn how to manage the commercial and financial sides of things, negotiations, business meetings. I genuinely enjoy this journey and everything I learn from it day by day. Even the mistakes we made early on weren’t fundamental or catastrophic — they were the normal mistakes any project goes through at the start, and we learned from them to keep developing how we work.

My ambition is for Arise to become more than a production company. We’re working toward investing in technological innovation itself — developing our own platforms and tools for visual content production. We already have a number of projects in early stages.

Alongside that, I feel we have a responsibility to build awareness around AI. I still see many people approaching AI with fear — so I’m working toward building an educational ecosystem that includes workshops, training courses, and possibly a podcast or a dedicated platform, to help creatives understand these tools and use them properly: as a means of supporting ideas, not replacing the people behind them. I also hope we can help a new generation of creatives produce work that would have been impossible before, simply because the budgets weren’t there.

I’m more convinced than ever that tools and software will keep evolving and changing — but directorial vision and the human touch are what give any work its real artistic value. That’s why I’m committed to continuous learning and staying current with everything new in this fast-moving field, so that Arise remains at the forefront of companies using AI for visual production — not just in the Arab world, but globally.