💼 Paragon CEO Bedeir Rizk doesn’t look, sound, or build like the rest of the industry. His new EGP 70 bn Saudi joint venture is the test of whether that difference scales.

Since the devaluation of the EGP, every developer in Egypt has been seeking Gulf capital. Large Egyptian real estate developers are establishing offices in Riyadh to capture a share of Saudi projects. Paragon Developments did that too, but they also did something more difficult: bring the capital home. Somou Boulevard — an EGP 70 bn mixed-use development in Mostakbal City, next to Madinaty — is Paragon’s joint venture with Adeer International, the investment arm of Saudi Arabia’s Sumou Holding, and a substantial piece of private-sector FDI in the Egyptian real estate sector.

From AI to real estate

The man who built the company and structured the agreement wasn’t in real estate at all six years ago. “The pieces that led to my entry into real estate fell into place during Covid,” says Rizk, who was an AI researcher. He built and sold an AI-and-robotics company in France, closing the exit in February 2020 — weeks before Covid. “Before I could think about what my next move was going to be, I found myself stuck in Cairo,” Rizk tells EnterpriseAM. “My father [a contractor] was constructing a building in the New Capital at the time (Paragon 1). I stepped into my father’s office building project and turned that into the company that you see today.”

Co-living and co-working spaces were always on Rizk’s mind. After completing his graduate studies at Frankfurt School of Finance and Columbia Business School, he experienced Berlin’s co-working scene in a building that counted Uber, Twitter, and SoundCloud as tenants. “There were also people who lived in that space. This idea of mixed-used spaces intrigued me. I look at my shift into real estate as going from the cloud to the ground. Successful real estate development is about creating systems, not just laying down slabs,” says Rizk.

That conviction can be seen in how the Sumou Boulevard agreement is structured. Rizk structured the JV the way UK and US institutional agreements are built — splitting the entity that owns and finances the asset from the entity that develops it. Adeer holds the majority of the property company, north of 70%, where the capital and the risk sit; Paragon takes a minority stake but keeps 51% of the development company, where the day-to-day control lives, Rizk tells us. “The structure is replicable — a template Adeer can use to channel more capital into Egyptian projects, with a local operator.” Sumou, Rizk notes, had been trying to enter the Egyptian market for the better part of a decade. What it lacked was the right structure.

Tearing down the walls

The ungated community. Rizk is pitching Sumou as Egypt’s first ungated mixed-use development at scale. In a market that has spent two decades perfecting the walled compound, with residents, retail, and offices each sealed behind their own gates and QR codes, that’s a departure. The masterplan comes from Gensler — the firm behind Dubai’s DIFC and Doha’s Msheireb — across roughly half a mn sqm. “It’s what I like to call the ‘inclusive-exclusive,’ privacy for residents, footfall for retail, access for offices, all on one plot without the walls, kind of like Zamalek and Downtown where everything coexists on the same street,” says Rizk.

The early commercial signs are promising. “The Nexus phase that we just launched — targeting young urban professionals aged 18 to 45 with studios from 30 sqm up through larger units, fully finished — sold out in 48 hours, moving USD 150 mn,” said Rizk. He believes the segment has been almost entirely ignored by an industry fixated on high-end gated products, and the speed of the sell-out suggests real unmet demand rather than a marketing spike.

Around the residential core, Rizk is assembling an ecosystem that includes innovation, culture, and well-being elements. According to Rizk, that means the creation of an innovation district with an AI campus run with Plug and Play, bringing in Schneider Electric and Orange as partners; including three international hotels: Canopy by Hilton and an Anantara from Minor; and establishing a cultural anchor with artist Moataz Nasr of Darb 1718.

On making real estate “exciting”

“This project is precisely how I intend to make real estate more exciting,” Rizk tells us. His method is to involve operators in the design from day zero rather than signing them as tenants at the end. He’s already in advanced stages of talks with some of Egypt’s proven talents in co-working and regenerative work spaces — a topic that he’s championed for a long time. “If the coolest people aren’t just in the club but built the club, he argues, everyone else wants in.”

Underneath it sits a thesis about the future of work — we still need physical spaces. Rizk’s wager is that as automation thins out teams and dissolves the nine-to-five, people will crave physical gathering more, not less. He points to a favorite book of his, The Network State by tech entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, and Airbnb buying a New York headquarters, as proof points for a return to physicality. Paragon’s own new office is deliberately half desks, half lounge, coffee shop, and terrace — the office reimagined as a social club. “Sumou Boulevard is that thesis at city scale,” says Rizk.

None of this is proven yet. Sumou Boulevard delivers in two tranches, in 2030 and 2033. The ungated model is untested at this scale in a market where buyers are programmed to pay a premium for walls.