One Egyptian founder and AI enthusiast is out to fix the broken visa process plaguing “residents of the Global South”

🤖🛩️ Endless toiling, heaps of bank statements and employment records, and as much proof as you can gather to make them believe you’re not going to make a run for it the second you land. That is exactly how the Visa application process goes for Egyptian single-passport holders. One Egyptian AI startup is out to change that.

If you’ve ever applied for a Schengen visa from Egypt, you know the drill. Weeks of document gathering, opaque checklists that change without notice, appointment slots that vanish before you can book them, and brokers who charge a premium to navigate a process that shouldn’t require navigation in the first place. For hundreds of mns of people traveling on “weak passports,” it’s a “50-year old humiliating process,” Aly Moursy (LinkedIn), founder of Veeza AI, tells EnterpriseAM.

So, what exactly is Veeza AI? It’s a straightforward pitch: upload your passport, tell the platform where you’re going, and an AI agent handles the rest — forms, translations, appointment booking, document verification — with a human expert reviewing every application before it goes anywhere near an embassy. The company launched its closed beta on 19 April and moved into public beta in June. A hard launch is planned for September.

The human building the AI

Moursy lived, breathed, and worked with technology for as long as he could remember. He tells us his obsession with technology started long before he could code. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all engineers. His mother’s family owns Abdel Rahim Koueider, the Cairo dessert institution his great-grandfather founded in the 1920s. Engineering ran on one side of the family; business on the other. Both would prove to serve him well.

Moursy studied electrical and communications engineering at Carleton University in Canada. By his first year, he was already building. In 2014, he launched Seeqe, a Q&A platform for local product discovery at a time when businesses weren’t yet online. The idea went “mini-viral” in his city before hitting its limits. It didn’t scale. He moved on. The following summer, he cold-emailed his way into becoming one of the first employees at BitAccess, a Y Combinator-backed Bitcoin ATM startup in Canada. “Being surrounded by those early-stage thinkers showed me what it takes to operate at that level,” Moursy adds.

After graduating, he joined Bell Canada’s Graduate Leadership Program, a selective rotational track where he spent three years as a product manager and UX lead. When Covid hit and local commerce shifted online, he co-founded Dlvvr — a Shopify app offering same-day local delivery for small businesses at a time when local delivery in Canada barely existed. The company bootstrapped to around USD 50k in revenue within a year before Moursy returned to Egypt.

Back in Cairo, he spent a year on the board of Abdel Rahim Koueider, helping modernize operations. Then came Efreshli, an interior design platform, where he led new product development and helped launch Efreshli AI: a tool that lets users redesign a room with AI and buy the resulting look directly from Efreshli’s catalog of over 200 brands.

Every company Moursy built has solved a problem between a person and something they’re trying to reach — a product, a package, a home design, and now a country.

… Veeza is the most ambitious version of that idea yet.

What Veeza AI actually does

The product targets what Moursy describes as the most acute pain point he encountered after returning to Egypt: “People with stable jobs and businesses who struggle to travel because they cannot secure visa appointments or have to navigate opaque travel agencies and brokers.”

A user selects a destination — Veeza currently supports around 20 countries, 10 of which are fully self-serve — and uploads their documents. The platform extracts passport details automatically, translates Arabic text to English, and formats the data for the relevant application forms. An adversarial AI model then runs a first pass, flagging missing items or potential errors. A human expert reviews those findings before anything moves forward. Once verified, a digital agent monitors embassy systems around the clock to secure an appointment slot. The user receives real-time WhatsApp updates and a complete application package — cover letters, appointment confirmation, pre-filled forms — ready to print.

Pricing runs on a fixed-fee model per completed application, ranging from EGP 1.5k for standard applications to EGP 4k for more complex country requirements. A B2B tier is also in development, offering subscription-based access for travel agencies processing bulk applications, with dedicated service-level agreements.

The human element is still as pivotal as ever. “Because visa applications are high-stakes, human supervision is vital,” Moursy tells EnterpriseAM. Within 12-24 months, he expects advanced AI models to reach near-perfect accuracy on standard flows. But human oversight, he argues, will remain necessary for a different reason: “Human orchestrators possess real-time domain strategy outside the AI’s training data — such as sudden policy updates issued by embassies in the last 24 hours.”

Built in Egypt, for Egypt and beyond

The September launch will mark Veeza’s transition from Egyptian beta to a broader play, but the ambition behind it extends well beyond visa processing. Moursy is making a larger argument about who builds AI for the Global South, and why it matters that the answer is someone who lives there.

“The future of consumer and B2B AI verticals in the Middle East must be built by people from the region,” he tells us. It’s not just patriotism or sentimentality that guides this, but rather structure. General-purpose models built in the Global North are trained on Global North problems — and the Global North, by and large, does not queue for visa appointments, navigate Arabic-language bureaucracy, or operate businesses in currencies that devalue overnight. “General models built in the West won’t solve Global South problems because they don’t experience them,” he says.

“People in the Global North rarely need tourist visas. Yet 70% of all global visas are tourist or short-stay visas.” The market exists at an enormous scale. What was missing was someone building the solution from the right side of the problem. Builders here can see solutions that are invisible from San Francisco or London.

Some 20% of Veeza’s roughly 700 weekly support inquiries already come from outside of Egypt — Ethiopia, Nigeria, Cameroon, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, and Global South nationals living in the US trying to obtain Schengen visas. “Egypt is our primary launch market. Once we establish our footprint in MENA, we plan to expand operations across Africa and Southeast Asia,” Moursy says. The Egyptian entrepreneur has big ambitions for his latest venture — while the company is currently bootstrapped, Moursy says, “that’s going to change soon.”