From Student Leadership to Reinventing Payments The idea behind Kanam Pay began with a problem that sounds almost trivial: a ticket, a payment, a phone that is suddenly unavailable. But for Aarif Mohamed Konnon Tiama, Co-Founder and CEO of Kanam Pay, those moments exposed something much larger about the way financial services work in Africa. If access to money depends entirely on a device, what happens when that device is lost, stolen, broken or simply out of battery? Tiama’s answer is increasingly ambitious: what if your face could become the key to accessing your money? Today, Kanam Pay is building biometric technology that allows financial institutions to offer payments, withdrawals and authentication through facial recognition. But the journey to that idea began years earlier, through student leadership, entrepreneurial experiments and a willingness to change direction when the original business model stopped making sense. Learning Leadership Before Becoming a Founder Tiama’s entrepreneurial education began at CESAG, where student leadership taught him lessons that would later prove essential in building a fintech…

Entrepreneurship often begins with identifying a gap in the market. For Dheema Fakir, however, it began with identifying a gap in her own life. Long before Taskin became one of the Maldives’ fastest-growing digital platforms, it was born out of personal hardship, career setbacks, and a determination to create the support system she wished had existed when she needed it most. Today, Taskin is helping reshape how Maldivians connect with work, talent, and opportunity. But its story is far more than that of a freelancer marketplace. It is the story of a founder who transformed some of life’s most difficult moments into a platform designed to empower thousands of others. From Human Resources to Entrepreneurship Before launching Taskin, Dheema spent years building a career across hospitality, healthcare, and human resources. Those industries gave her a unique perspective on one recurring problem: organizations were constantly searching for skilled people, while talented individuals struggled to showcase their abilities and secure meaningful opportunities. Working in HR also exposed another uncomfortable reality. Employment, even…

Mustafa Khan left accounting to build Draper with Sakib Ahmed. The agency now works with more than 50 founders and executives and says its clients have generated over 350 million LinkedIn views.

Curiosity, Conviction, and the Birth of a Bigger Vision In the race to build the next generation of artificial intelligence, most startups are focused on helping developers write code faster. Every few weeks, a new AI coding assistant promises to generate applications, automate programming tasks, or accelerate software development. But while much of the industry competes to create more code, Ishraq Khan is solving a problem that receives far less attention—maintaining the billions of lines of software that already power the modern world. As the Founder and CEO of Kodezi, Ishraq believes the future of software engineering will not be defined by AI that simply writes code on command. Instead, he envisions AI becoming a permanent engineering partner—one that continuously understands entire codebases, identifies problems before they become outages, remembers years of technical decisions, and helps organizations keep increasingly complex software systems healthy. It is an ambitious vision that has already attracted more than five million registered users worldwide and positioned Kodezi as one of the emerging innovators in AI-powered…

Where Financial Inclusion Meets Agriculture When policymakers discuss financial inclusion, the conversation almost always revolves around banking access, digital payments, and microfinance. Billions of dollars have been invested globally to connect underserved populations to the formal financial system. Yet for Mujtaba Khalid, Co-Founder and CEO of Bagh-e, those efforts have often overlooked a more fundamental question: What happens after someone gains access to finance? After spending more than fourteen years working in Islamic finance across multiple jurisdictions, Mujtaba began to notice a recurring pattern. Governments, regulators, financial institutions, NGOs, and development agencies were making remarkable progress in expanding access to financial services. Digital wallets were opening, payment systems were improving, and financial technology was reaching previously underserved communities. However, many of the people these initiatives sought to empower—particularly smallholder farmers—continued to struggle economically. His work took him across Africa, Central Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, where agriculture remains the backbone of many economies. Throughout these regions, he found that smallholder farmers consistently represented one of the most financially excluded…

After helping educate thousands of software developers through MohirDev, Mukhammad Khalil realized that talent alone wasn’t enough. Today, through Startup Garage, he is building the entrepreneurial infrastructure that could transform Uzbekistan into one of the world’s next great startup ecosystems. For decades, countries have been known for the natural resources they export. Saudi Arabia exports oil. Australia exports minerals. Brazil exports agricultural products. But what if a country could become known for exporting something far more valuable—entrepreneurs? That is the vision driving Mukhammad Khalil, Founder of Startup Garage, a venture studio that is quietly reshaping the entrepreneurial landscape of Central Asia. While many organizations focus on helping individual startups succeed, Khalil is thinking on an entirely different scale. His ambition is to build an ecosystem where creating successful technology companies becomes a repeatable capability rather than an occasional success story. It is an ambitious mission. Yet it is rooted in a simple observation. Great founders rarely emerge because of talent alone. They emerge when talented people are surrounded by mentors,…

Technology has transformed almost every aspect of modern life. We work online, shop online, consume news online, and spend countless hours every day navigating websites and social media platforms. Yet for many consumers, particularly those seeking to make ethical purchasing decisions, one challenge remains remarkably difficult: knowing who is behind the companies they interact with. For Ahmed Hassanein, a software developer with more than fourteen years of experience, this problem became deeply personal. While searching for job opportunities, he found himself spending hours researching companies, checking their headquarters, ownership structures, and investment backgrounds to ensure they aligned with his personal values. The process was repetitive, frustrating, and almost impossible to scale. “I kept thinking,” Ahmed recalls, “instead of doing this manually for every company, why isn’t there a tool that simply tells me the moment I open a website?” That simple question eventually evolved into The Wall, a free platform that today identifies and blocks more than 20,000 Israeli-linked websites and social media accounts, helping users make informed decisions before…

Artificial intelligence has rapidly become one of the biggest priorities for enterprises across the world. Organizations are investing billions of dollars into generative AI, autonomous agents, and intelligent automation, hoping to transform everything from customer service to healthcare and financial decision-making. Yet despite the excitement, many AI initiatives never make it beyond the pilot stage. While headlines often celebrate breakthroughs in large language models and AI capabilities, a quieter problem continues to hold enterprises back—how do you prove that an AI system is actually ready for production? For Asad Mansoor, Co-Founder and CEO of Accelerate AI, that question has defined his entrepreneurial journey. Rather than building another AI application, Asad is focused on building something far more fundamental: trust. His startup is developing the governance and risk infrastructure that enables organizations to measure AI risk, generate evidence for decision-makers, and confidently deploy artificial intelligence in highly regulated industries. “The technology usually isn’t the problem,” he says. “The real challenge is proving that it’s safe enough to deploy.” A Career Built…