Case study · Venture Studio · Co-Founder

Xanadu — the AI venture studio for founders who don’t fit accelerator timelines.

Xanadu is the AI-focused venture studio I co-founded with Hussain Al Menyawy in 2024 — a two-time Egyptian founder with networks across Arab, Gulf, and African ecosystems. The thesis is that most early-stage founders don’t get what they need from accelerator cycles, and the gap between accelerator graduation and real product-market traction is where most startups die quietly. We’re building Xanadu for the founders whose problems don’t fit the accelerator timeline. Currently four ideas in active development. This page is short on purpose.

Role: Co-Founder
Period: 2024 — Present
Co-Founder: Hussain Al Menyawy
Portfolio: 4 ideas in active development · Tapback ran through here

What Xanadu is

Xanadu is an AI-focused venture studio. We co-founded it in 2024 — myself and Hussain Al Menyawy, who’s a two-time Egyptian founder with networks across Arab, Gulf, and African ecosystems. The two of us bring complementary positions: I focus on the product and technical side, Hussain brings the founder and commercial network and the deal-side judgement. We work with equity stakes across the portfolio.

The thesis

The studios and accelerators that exist today serve a particular shape of founder well — early-stage, two-cofounder, prototype-ready, willing to follow the program timeline. But there are other founders who have real ideas and can’t fit that shape. Three patterns we see most often.

A technical founder working a deep problem who needs product validation help they don’t have time to build themselves. A strong technical founder still in their day job who needs the bridge to make the leap. Or a business-background founder with a real customer insight but no technical ability to ship.

For all three, what’s missing isn’t a six-month program. It’s targeted help at the specific bottleneck — getting an MVP that actually works, getting the first ten to fifty customers, getting the round closed. We’re building Xanadu to be that targeted help, structured as a venture studio rather than as another accelerator.

Where it stands

Currently we have four ideas in active development — a mix of new ventures we’ve sourced and existing teams we’ve come in to accelerate. Tapback, the restaurant-tech rebuild now landing in Saudi Arabia, ran through Xanadu. The other ideas are at earlier stages and not yet at a point where there’s something public to share.

This page is short on purpose. Xanadu is still early. There’s a strong argument that an operating venture studio has nothing to say publicly until the first portfolio outcomes have landed clearly. We disagree slightly — the work itself is real, the thesis is clear, and saying so honestly is part of how we attract the right founders. But we’re not pretending to be further along than we are. When the portfolio has more to point at, this page will say more.