I am Mohamed ElMasry. I built global technology from Upper Egypt

The story starts far from the usual startup centres. When asked about the beginning of his entrepreneurial journey, Mohammed ElMasry goes back to Upper Egypt, where he grew up and studied Electronics Engineering at Minia University. From the outset, his ambition was not simply to build products, but to create a technological environment in a region largely excluded from it.

After graduating in 2004, he founded a company in Luxor focused on technology solutions for tourist boats and floating hotels across Luxor and Aswan. The team introduced an automated internet service that removed the need for hotel staff intervention, an unfamiliar concept at the time. The deployment succeeded, but ElMasry is clear-eyed about the limits of that early win. Lacking management experience, he could not fully scale the business. Still, the intent mattered. The goal was to prove that advanced technology could be built and sustained in Upper Egypt, and that it could generate meaningful jobs in the process.

When the conversation turns to what came next, ElMasry describes a shift from local experimentation to global execution. Alongside a group of young engineers, he co-founded Silicon Vision, a semiconductor company developing wireless technologies. These were not outsourced components or incremental tools. They were products sold directly to global players such as Intel and Sony.

What mattered most to him was where the work was done. Technologies that were typically developed only in Europe or the United States were designed locally, by an Egyptian team operating at world-class standards. The validation came when a major US company acquired all of Silicon Vision’s technologies, confirming that the capability gap many assumed simply did not exist.

Pressed on how he prepared himself for larger ambitions, ElMasry explains a deliberate decision to step into big systems rather than build another small one. He moved to the Gulf and joined a cybersecurity company serving ministries of interior and defence, as well as banks. At the beginning, he was the company’s only engineer.

The experience taught him how large organisations function, particularly in high-stakes environments where reliability and security are non-negotiable. After the January 25 Revolution, he returned to Egypt, motivated by the possibility of restarting what he had once begun, this time with a clearer understanding of scale and structure.

On the question of Tactful’s earliest form, ElMasry is open about the misdirection. The initial idea was a smart home platform combining hardware and software to help everyday users adopt connected technologies. It was ambitious, heavily centred on user experience, and ultimately too large to fund in one go.

Rather than abandoning the effort, the team dismantled it. Each component was tested independently, and over time one insight stood out. The most immediate and scalable value lay in software that helped businesses improve customer experience. That pivot, grounded in experimentation rather than theory, became the foundation of Tactful.

When asked about hiring, ElMasry rejects the idea of assembling a team from ready-made talent. His approach was to recruit fresh graduates and invest deeply in their development. The aim was not short-term output, but long-term capability.

He wanted to create engineers and developers who could eventually build their own companies. Today, many of those early hires are delivering at a global level, and the company is preparing to expand further, particularly in Cairo. For ElMasry, team-building is inseparable from ecosystem-building.

Asked to reflect on what founders need most, ElMasry focuses less on tools and more on alignment. Startups fail, in his view, when teams do not share the same dream. The journey is difficult enough without competing personal agendas.

Equally important is the idea of societal value. Businesses that do not solve real problems, he argues, cannot form the basis of a strong economy. Innovation only matters when it produces something useful, not just profitable.

When the conversation turns directly to Tactful, ElMasry frames the company as a response to a widening gap between customer expectations and business capabilities. Customers want fast, consistent and intelligent service across every channel, from phone calls to social media. Most organisations are not set up to deliver that.

Tactful builds AI-powered systems that unify these channels, consolidate customer data and automate large parts of the service process. The goal is not to remove humans, but to enable them to respond better. What began with two people has grown into a team of more than 60 engineers working on complex customer engagement problems across multiple markets.

Asked about the company’s future, ElMasry points to capability rather than geography. With R&D hubs in Cairo and Cambridge, Tactful invests heavily in AI research to maintain its edge. The focus now is expansion into Europe and beyond, supported by a team trained to deliver quickly without sacrificing quality.

The ambition is clear. Build world-class technology locally, then compete globally without apology.

When asked whether Tactful represented the final destination, ElMasry says no. He moved to Europe to experience what it meant to operate inside a truly global organisation, joining a major company in Cambridge. Working with cross-continental teams exposed him to different cultures, operational models and decision-making structures.

That experience sharpened his understanding of how technologies move from research into everyday life, and how large systems sustain themselves over time.

On the subject of challenges, ElMasry does not point to algorithms or architecture. The hardest task was attracting people willing to take a risk on a small company with limited resources. He needed engineers who could imagine something that did not yet exist and commit to building it.

Funding presented a second obstacle. In the Middle East, he notes, investors are often more comfortable backing service businesses than deep technology. The irony is that the same ideas would attract capital easily in Europe or the United States, where the ecosystem better understands long-term technical risk.

Asked to assess what the company has achieved, ElMasry highlights substance over scale. Over the past three years, Tactful AI has invested more than $5 million in developing its own artificial intelligence technologies, resulting in the first fully Egyptian AI platform designed specifically for customer experience management.

The product is now used across the Middle East and Europe by companies in retail, e-commerce, hospitality and finance, delivering faster and more personalised customer interactions.

When asked about his ultimate ambition, ElMasry returns to the idea of multiplication. He wants Tactful to be a seed, not an endpoint. His hope is that team members will go on to found their own companies, exporting technology built in Egypt to the rest of the world.

For him, success is not only measured by market share, but by how many new builders emerge from the process.

On the decision to establish Tactful in the UK, ElMasry is pragmatic. Company formation is simple, inexpensive and fast. More importantly, the UK actively supports technology businesses through funding and infrastructure. A significant portion of Tactful’s early financing came from British government support.

Despite this, the company’s centre of gravity remains in Cairo. The team is based there, and early clients came from Egypt and the Gulf, including El Araby Group, Etisalat Egypt and Mubadala. The structure reflects ElMasry’s broader philosophy. Global presence, local roots.