Confirmed SPEAKERS
+ many more to come
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Abe Wehbe
Partner, TAFT Stettinius & Hollister
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Allia Mohamed
Co-Founder & CEO, OPENIGLOO
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Amjad Ahmad
Managing Partner, 500 GLOBAL
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Anis Bennaceur
Co-Founder & CEO, ATTENTION
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Basel Fakhoury
CEO & Cofounder, USER INTERVIEWS
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Ben Wilde
Head of Innovation, GEORGIAN
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Dinesh Maheshwari
Founding Partner, GROQ
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Haley Bryant
Partner, HUSTLE FUND
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Hamza Derbas
Co-Founder & CEO, MAVEN ROBOTICS
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Hamza Shad
Insights Manager, CARTA
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Hani Azzam
Partner, PROPELLER
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Jessica Al-Hussaini
Principal, GLOBIVEST
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Josef Najm
Principal Investor, TR VENTURES
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Karim Jouini
CEO, THUNDERS
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Katy Nelson
General Partner, HELENA CAPITAL
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Khaled Kteily
Founder & CEO, LEGACY
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Mazen Al Zaidi
General Partner, STV
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Najeeb Jarrar
Regional Director, Marketing, Middle East & Africa, GOOGLE
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Namek Zubi
Co-Founder & Managing Partner, SILICON BADIA
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Nour Taher
Founder & CEO, INTELLA
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Omar Darwazah,
Managing Director & General Partner, AAF MANAGEMENT Ltd.
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Omar J. Sati
Managing Partner, DASH VENTURES
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Philippe D de Bourg (Burke)
Chief Investment Officer, APACHE CAPITAL MANAGEMENT
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Rana Al-Hallaq
Vice President, PFIZER VENTURES
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Samir Addamine
Co-Founder & CEO, HERON
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Sara Rona
Managing Director, Head of EMEA, Silicon Valley Bank
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Tamim Bazzi
Partner, COOLEY
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Tressia Hobeika
Co-Founder & CPO, STEPFUL
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Waleed Atallah
Founder & CEO, MAKORA
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Yusef Kassim
Partner, ADVENT
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Zach Finkelstein
Managing Partner, CLASS 5 GLOBAL
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Zaid Farekh
Founder, PROPELLER
Agenda
under construction
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Great startups do not begin with a moat — they earn one. In a market that is slower to believe and quicker to scrutinize, this session explores how founders move from an initial wedge to something more durable: winning early conviction, finding real customer pull, and building the product, positioning, and distribution that compound over time. We’ll look at how startups go from merely promising to genuinely defensible.
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Capital is moving — across sectors, across borders, and away from where it sat even a year ago. This panel brings together allocators from North America and MENA to examine where that movement is actually heading: which shifts are structural and likely to hold, which are simply fashionable and likely to fade, and where the two regions are reading the same signals differently. The discussion will reveal where conviction is forming, where consensus is fragile, and how regional capital views the next cycle differently.
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AI is not just changing how companies are built; it is changing who owns the bottlenecks, who captures the upside, and what becomes valuable when intelligence itself becomes abundant. This conversation looks at the deeper power shifts beneath the AI boom, from compute and infrastructure to labor, ownership, and control. We’ll explore what kind of economy is emerging — and who is really positioned to shape it. If intelligence becomes cheap, what becomes scarce?
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The AI cycle is creating enormous value, but where that value lands is far from settled. As companies stay private longer, raise at public-market scale, and the secondary markets delay IPOs, the old sequence is breaking. This debate puts public-market price discovery against private capital's illiquid conviction — who captures the upside, who absorbs the downside, and who even gets access. Two camps, one cycle. Will you pick a side?
We're curating an exciting agenda that will include keynote speakers, engaging panel discussions, curated networking, and exclusive meetups with leading founders, investors, operators, and executives from high-growth companies. Stay tuned for additional speaker and session announcements.
Champion Partner
Event Partners + more to come
Community Partners + more to come
Get in Touch
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