Meet our Founder of the Month: Olimi AI’s Shaden El Olimi

🤖 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 Shaden El Olimi (LinkedIn), co-founder of Arabic-language AI voice company Olimi AI.

El Olimi graduated from The American University in Cairo with a major in business marketing and a minor in sociology. She found an early business partner in her brother Omar El Olimi (LinkedIn), starting out with a software development company in 2018 where they were building apps and websites for businesses and startups, before they launched Olimi AI and secured their first client in mid-2025. “We always knew that we wanted to have our own product and eventually be a product-led company,” Shaden El Olimi tells EnterpriseAM.

After two years of developing the product, they launched their voice AI startup, helping businesses and enterprises automate their call centers with AI. While many large language models (LLMs) were trained primarily on Modern Standard Arabic, they took a different approach, training their models on specific regional dialects — starting with Egyptian Arabic.

This put Olimi AI ahead of the game. “Whenever anyone heard our Arabic, they were shocked that something like that even exists,” El Olimi says. The company is pretty much a family affair — a startup of just 10 people, mostly engineers, with Shaden leading the commercial side as CCO, her younger brother Omar serving as the technical CEO and “the brains behind everything,” and her husband Hazem Sorour (LinkedIn) joining as the third co-founder after making a career switch from engineering to take charge of Olimi’s business development.

When Omar and Shaden were knee-deep in software development, Sorour was a strong advocate for building an AI-native product and heading into Voice AI. “It actually came from the pain of having issues with customer service: how can we build something that actually solves customer experience overall in our region? Because we don’t get the same customer experience people get, let’s say, in Europe or abroad, or even in the Gulf,” he tells EnterpriseAM.

How Olimi AI works: “Instead of a human picking up the phone, an AI can handle the call from start to finish. It’s conversational, and it’s not robotic where if you’re asking about X, it says Y. It’s a full-on conversation, and it has the ability to transfer the call to a human agent if needed. It can update the CRM, and it can do a lot of things during the call.”

Why Olimi AI? The El Olimi siblings wanted to solve a problem that they knew technology was going to solve eventually — they needed to act fast. Being the first people to do voice AI in Egyptian Arabic in Egypt at the time, they had zero competitors when they first launched. Olimi offered a solution to companies weighed down by excessive customer support overhead. “We spoke to a lot of customers. We were talking to people every day, going to meetings, jumping on calls, and we listened to their problems,” El Olimi says.

Customer support at scale is difficult to manage consistently, according to El Olimi. Turnover is high, and even well-trained agents will naturally vary in tone and energy across the long shift. Olimi’s agents seek to solve that consistency problem at volume. “It’s the same quality every single call, which is a huge edge,” she explains.

The company hasn’t raised outside investment yet — bootstrapped — but they were able to build the product while running their software house, which already had an established team of engineers. “We kind of did it the other way around. We built the product first because we already had a software house and we were just building products left, right, and center,” she describes.

The company prides itself on its longevity in the game. Shaden sees Olimi AI’s upper hand in its first-mover advantage, having been in the market from day one and gaining more experience in the voice AI space. “We’ve been through all the pitfalls; we’ve tried all the models.”

While the Voice AI market has made significant progress, the technology remains a challenging domain. Omar El Olimi tells EnterpriseAM about the technical difficulties of building Voice AI: “The market is definitely more saturated [now], but it’s not as much as you think, because working with Voice AI is not an easy task. A lot of things can go wrong; a lot of things need to be dealt with hands-on, and it needs a lot of testing. There’s a hard barrier to entry for Voice AI for anyone to start,” he adds.

For Olimi AI, success is measured by a combination of traction, the number of minutes people spend using their product, and how seamlessly they can integrate into a company’s operations. “We don’t tell [companies] to lay off their call center team. At first, we’d be handling outbound calls only, and then we’d start handling inbound calls as well. Then we’d go from handling 20% of the outbound calls to 40 and 60%. That’s how you know you’re successful,” she says.

Right now, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are the AI company’s main target markets, seeing as they represent more than 50% of all calls made in the region, according to Shaden El Olimi. Although the founders initially had their sights set on global usage, they quickly recognized Egypt’s prominence as a call center hub, with most of their clients outsourcing their call center operations to the country. Catering to other Arabic-speaking markets with different dialects is also on the cards, she says.

“Working with my wife and my brother-in-law is a little unorthodox,” Sorour acknowledges, but the trio makes it work by setting some “ground rules” to keep family and business matters separate. As both life and business partners, El Olimi and Sorour have found a good balance at Olimi, with Sorour describing how they “complement each other in different ways.”

Work-life balance isn’t always easy for El Olimi. As a mother of two, she juggles two full-time jobs, but still manages to carve out time to invest in her startup. For her, one of the most rewarding aspects of leading Olimi AI is staying up to date with what’s happening in the world. “The technology is getting better every single day, and sitting at the office surrounded by all these engineers keeps you up to date with what’s going on in the world,” she describes.

The company recently took home the “Disruptive Egyptian Startup” award among 300+ exhibiting startups at the international AI Everything MEA summit — a notable milestone for the Arabic-first Voice AI platform as it continues to build out its presence in the regional AI market.

“The fact that small teams like ours are able to compete for the first time in more than 50 or 60 years with large BPOs or call centers opens up a huge [possibility] where it’s not just, ‘hey, let’s build a tech company, just throw money at it, and just grow at any cost.’ [Voice AI] is one of the pockets in AI where you can actually build a profitable, sustainable business out of it,” Sorour adds.

“We’re in it for the long run,” Shaden says of being part of a family business, where support is plentiful and there’s always a strong sense of mutual recognition for their achievements. Her advice to new entrepreneurs boils down to one thing: trial and error. “If you try something and it doesn’t work, try something else and never give up. Maybe the first idea or project won’t go as planned, maybe it’s the fourth one that will.”