On August 13, 14, and 15, 2021, the All Girls Code team ran a summer program called Techsplore, to train and introduce young girls to the applications of coding and programming. All Girls Code is an award-winning, student-led initiative, based at the Maroun Semaan Faculty of Engineering and Architecture at AUB, that has welcomed more than 600 young girls from different regions in Lebanon to its free-of-charge STEM programs since its inception in 2017.

During the program, LebNet’s Women in Tech (WiT) and Early in Career (EIC) communities gave two virtual workshops covering CV writing and landing internships in the tech field for young girls in Beirut. The sessions were led by Aya Mouallem, WiT Outreach Program Lead, Electrical Engineering PhD Student at Stanford University, and co-founder of All Girls Code, and by Yara Akiki, EIC Community Outreach Program Lead and Software Engineer at Robinhood. The workshops covered the top programming skills sought after today and the common mistakes of CV writing. 

Despite the power outage crisis in Lebanon, 106 girls attended the workshops proving yet again their extreme focus on education and a better future.  

“When I signed up for AGC, I didn’t know that you could learn so much in three days. We were introduced to many successful women from the MENA who are paving the way for other women in STEM. Fortunately, we had the opportunity to talk to co-founder and Stanford scholar Aya Mouallem as well as a software engineer in Silicon Valley, Yara Akiki,” said Halla Daas, one of the participants in the program. “They guided us through CV writing, landing internships, and working or doing research during undergrad. The session was beneficial like no other. I would definitely come back next year to meet other driven like-minded girls. Thank you AGC!”

LebNet strongly believes in the importance of supporting the Lebanese youth back home and especially these high school girls who demonstrated great technical knowledge and a lot of ambition for building sustainable futures in tech. We look forward to continued partnerships and collaborations on programs that empower and benefit our Lebanese youth.

“This is my first year volunteering with All Girls Code from abroad. As an AUB student, I was fortunate enough to co-found and lead this initiative for 4 years with a bunch of AUB students, and it means the world to me to see AGC continue to flourish and empower more girls with different socio-economic backgrounds, especially through a collaboration with LebNet,” said Mouallem. “I was very impressed with the calibre of questions I received during the workshops, and I’m truly hoping that these young girls maintain their strong drive to persist through the current hardships in Lebanon, and that they get a fair chance to follow their ambitions in tech back home.”

It has been over two decades since the last Arab company traded on the NASDAQ.

Anghami made history on March 3, 2021 by announcing a merger with NASDAQ-listed SPAC Vistas Media Acquisition Company (VMAC*). The landmark merger partnership with VMAC will position Anghami as the first Lebanese and Arab tech company to list on NASDAQ through a SPAC. The Anghami IPO is expected to close in mid-June and Anghami will trade on NASDAQ under the ticker ANGH.

*Vistas Media Acquisition Company Inc. (NASDAQ: VMAC, https://vmac.media/), a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company.

Since its inception in 2012, this music live streaming platform has harnessed  over 50 million active users and has 1 billion streams a month. Anghami started with a meeting in a coffee shop in Lebanon between longtime business partners Elie Habib and Eddy Maroun. 

“We’ve been partners for 21 years and we wanted to try something new. There was no iTunes in the region until 2015, so for many people in the Middle East we came first, which is a very good place to be,” said co-founder and CTO Elie during a panel discussion hosted by LebNet on April 10, 2021. 

“We’re friends and we complement each other with our backgrounds, experience and character. It’s very good to have two founders,” added co-founder and CEO Eddy. 

The panel hosted by LebNet and moderated by Hala Jalwan, manager at Google, covered Anghami’s successful journey from inception to IPO, going over the technology and future plans. In addition to the Anghami founders, the panel was joined by Rabih Khoury - Managing Partner and Chief Exit Officer at MEVP, a MENA-focused VC firm and Anghami’s earliest investor - and Abdo George Kadifa, Managing Director at Sumeru Equity Partners and LebNet’s Chairman. Kadifa gave an overview on SPACs (Special Purpose Acquisition Companies), which is the vehicle by which Anghami is going public. 

Below are the main highlights from the events and you can always watch the livestream on our YouTube channel here. 

Hala: When Anghami pitched to MEVP, what was the impression and why did you decide to invest?  

Rabih: We are privileged to have partnered with Anghami on their Seed, Series A and B rounds. One key highlight I remember from our meeting is that they are complementary: two co-founders, the introvert and extrovert, the media and tech guy. They had taken a loan on their residences to get the first streaming license from Rotana, which takes a lot of guts and trust in their ability. It’s one of MEVP's top companies. 

Hala: What are your future plans for the MENA region and the diaspora?  

Eddy: There’s a lot to be done in the Middle East because it’s still a big and under-penetrated market. We also have plans to target the diaspora. This is a market of 100 million people that would be interested to have content that brings them back to their home. The plan is to go to emerging markets in South Asia and Africa. We also want to produce content due to the lack of Arabic content and the high demand for it.

We’re also going into new verticals:

• Re-inventing the radio: any artist can be a radio host and interact with their own fan base. 
• Virtual concerts: create a platform for artists to host concerts and monetize 
• Investing in MENA’s youth: 50% of the audience in the MENA are youth and have a huge consumption for media and entertainment 

Elie: We created payment logistics across the Middle East. We invested to create a network of 36 telcos and plugged them directly into our platform as a way to solve the issue of multiple credit card types. We also allowed artists to self-produce. We did not invest much in marketing. Since inception, we only raised 26 million Dollars. What we’re now raising in the IPO is roughly 4 times as much to spend first on marketing, then on content and R&D. 

Hala: What are SPACs?
Abdo George: Public markets have seen in the past some fundamentals that have created the SPAC movement. The first fundamental is that a lot of public companies are going private through private equity firms (a third of publicly listed tech companies have gone from public to private). Second there’s a price valuation difference between the public and the private markets: you can be valued much higher on the public markets. 

Third is with the way interest rates are: there’s a significant appetite for investors to invest in equities vs in fixed income instruments. 

You put the three together you get how the SPAC movement is created. It’s trying to enable public investors to have access to good companies and get returns. In the first quarter of this year, the SPAC movement saw a massive influx of investment. This is good for a company like Anghami.

Rabih: Anghami should have gone public on the local market but the Middle East is not one country. Digital is on the rise but our local public markets don’t really reflect the real economy. The SPAC was the optimal solution for Anghami considering the region. Going public through a SPAC is not easy. Our partner VMAC is a 100 million Dollar SPAC focused on investing in streaming companies in Emerging Markets so we’re a bit away from the high volatility of the US SPAC space.

Hala: Why an IPO not a VC round? 

Elie: By doing an IPO, we’re allowing the VCs to exit and profit and it gives us the independence to keep growing the company while remaining at the helm. We still want to build more and have Anghami become a multi-billion Dollar company.

Eddy: We have a vision to become a media platform that can go global but we want to maintain the footprint of an Arabic company going global. 

Hala: What is the technology behind Anghami?

Elie: Anghami is a streaming, payment and artist platform. Everything was built in-house by 70 engineers, but back then we built everything with a team of under 50 engineers. All of that was built in Beirut and 90% of the people were junior. We recruited people and taught them and we had our own academy. We have so much talent in Lebanon if we know how to work with it. It’s great raw talent. Our company will always grow its office in Lebanon but we had to move our HQ to Abu Dhabi in the UAE to benefit from the diversity. 

These last two years have been exceptional by all means. 

In the face of a global relentless pandemic, remote work has changed the way people conduct business all over the world. Zoom dress code has become a thing and the only way to share knowledge and acquire it is through online video conferencing tools. 

Pre-Covid-19, LebNet hosted talks and events on a regular basis, gathering communities from all over the US and Canada to discuss high tech, biotechnology, robotics, 5G among other topics. Since last April 2020, we moved our offline activities to webinars and online talks to keep the trend going safely. 

In order not to miss out on any previous event, we compiled below a list of all recent and older webinars and talks with their respective links on our YouTube channel. Make sure to also subscribe to the channel so you get notified of any upcoming video. 

Videos will be listed by date, from newest to oldest. 

Webinars

• Silicon Valley Channel: “We” wins over “I” in Winning Startups Part 5: The Silicon Valley Channel is a series of tech talks launched by LebNet and the Maroun Semaan Faculty of Engineering and Architecture (MSFEA) at the American University of Beirut (AUB). The most recent part of this series hosted a webinar with Magid Abraham, founder and CEO of Neurawell Therapeutics, a pharmaceutical company developing mental health treatments.
  
  
• Silicon Valley Channel: Warehouse Automation Overview and Trends with Joe Zoghzoghy Part 4: Joe Zoghzoghy, CTO at Bastian Solutions, provided an overview of the technologies employed in warehouse automation, such as Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems (ASRS), Good-to-Person technologies, Autonomous Ground Vehicles, and Robotics.
  
  
• How is the COVID-19 Pandemic impacting AI Solutions? What is the role of AI for businesses and industries trying to navigate the COVID-19 crisis? Will the world post-COVID create new opportunities for AI solutions? Which previously promising areas of AI will face challenges and delays? How are AI startups weathering the storm? All these questions and more were discussed by Johnny Ghibril, VP, Data Science & Solution Architecture at B.Yond; Anthony Tayoun, Co-founder and COO/CFO at Dexai Robotics; and George Trad, VP of Product at Kasisto.
  
  
• Silicon Valley Channel: 5G Opportunities and Challenges Part 3: Fram Akiki, former Vice President, Electronics & Semiconductor Industry for Siemens Digital Industries Software, talked about 5G opportunities and challenges.
  
  
• Silicon Valley Channel: IP Rights and Issues Part 2: Mark Abumeri, a partner at law firm Knobbe Martens with over twenty years of IP law experience under his belt, covered the basic characteristics of IP assets, including copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets.
  
  
• VC & Investor Perspective on Challenges faced by Startups during COVID-19: In this webinar, panelists Habib Haddad, Managing Partner, E14 Fund; Habib Kairouz, Managing Partner, Rho Capital Partners; Khaled Nasr, General Partner and COO, InterWest Partners; George Kadifa, Managing Partner, Sumeru Equity Partners and Jeffrey Akiki, Early Stage Investor, Bolt discussed how this global crisis is affecting founders in the US, Canada and the global ecosystem in general. They presented insights on how VC portfolios are impacted and how they see the future changing.
  
  
• COVID-19: Will Science Deliver a Timely Solution? The following panelists walked us through a day in the life of a physician at the forefront, discussing what technology can do to expedite a solution, and preview what drugs are on the horizon with the potential to cure or prevent the spread of the disease: Ammar Qadan, Vice President & Global Market Access Lead at Illumina; Muhieddine Makkouk, Vice President, Alliance Management at Gilead; Dr. Salwan AbiEzzi, Lead Physician, Encina Practice at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation. Moderator: Dr. Farah Fawaz, Vice President of Quality at Allogene Therapeutics, LebNet Board Member

Events

• LebNet Virtual Holiday Event - Dec 15, 2020: LebNet hosted on December 15 its annual holiday event virtually, featuring a wine tasting session conducted by Daou Family Estates' proprietor Daniel Daou, followed by an award ceremony where it presented its Second Annual Bireme Award to Fouad (Ford) Tamer, CEO at Inphi Corporation. At the end, singer Leila Milki prepared a medley of multilingual songs, dazzling us with her angelic singing voice and wonderful piano playing.
• Fouad (Ford) Tamer receives LebNet Bireme Award: LebNet's Second Bireme Award ceremony was held during the Annual Virtual Holiday event, where we presented our Executive of the Year 2020 to Fouad (Ford) Tamer, CEO at Inphi Corporation. In this video, he talked about his journey, from early startups to building clientele and growing businesses.
• The Inspiring Story Behind Daou Vineyards:The Inspiring Story Behind Daou Vineyards: LebNet Virtual Holiday featured an inspiring talk given by Daniel Daou, one of the two proprietors of Daou Vineyards, one of the fastest selling wines in the US. Daniel took us through the early struggles of moving during the war to France, then following the American dream and founding with his brother one of the fastest growing wineries in the country. Watch the video to find out what makes their wines so viral, the inspiring story of the name behind their best wine ‘Soul of the Lion’ and much more.

Boston, Toronto, Montreal, Austin - Oct, 2020

How are startups doing in Lebanon? How do they receive support?

What’s the ecosystem like?
How can the diaspora give back?
Where are the success stories? 

It’s hard for those living outside of Lebanon to know what’s happening in the startup tech scene in the country. 

To provide an overview of the Lebanese ecosystem, LebNet, in collaboration with Lebanon-based accelerator Speed, kicked off a series of events in Boston (October 1st), Toronto (October 2nd), Montreal (October 3rd) and Austin (October 7th). 

The events featured Speed’s CEO Sami Abou Saab, LebNet’s community leads and members. Abou Saab gave an overview of Lebanon’s startup scene and how Speed is supporting local entrepreneurs and focused the discussions on how LebNet members can give back to Lebanon. 

LebNet board member Habib Haddad and Sami Abou discussing with attendees opportunities to give back to Lebanon during LebNet’s Boston event.

“People want a bridge back to Lebanon and want to be involved. We asked them why are you attending and what do you want to achieve,” Abou Saab said. “What we discussed was totally new for many people. It was positive and refreshing to them and we shed light on what was happening.” 

The audience was a mix of startup founders, investors, future entrepreneurs, tech enthusiasts, lawyers and professionals. 

Lebanon’s startup scene in numbers 

Talks given by Abou Saab on the status of entrepreneurship in Lebanon were new and refreshing to many as the current situation in Lebanon does not convey such positive news. The nascent ecosystem is making humble yet steady improvements that are bringing a new wave of innovators and entrepreneurs. 

He explained how the ecosystem is growing and rising on the side of the economy, given it’s forward-looking in its nature and approach. At the same time, it is in such economic conditions that access to talent becomes better and easier allowing startups to build strong teams who can solve major challenges.

“People asked about the kind of startups we get and what they’re doing. They want to be engaged and be part of the ecosystem and many of them want to help,” said Abou Saab. 

A graphic by Speed revealing the different funding stages available for startups in Lebanon.

To recap some of the things discussed during the four events, we listed below some interesting data points on the Lebanese startup scene:

New York - June 5, 2020

On June 5, LebNet and LIFE organized a fintech panel in New York on alternative online lending models. This event was hosted by Eli Curi, Tech startup, venture, and M&A lawyer at Fenwick & West and took place in their NYC offices which resemble more an innovation space than a law firm.

The panelists were Renaud Laplanche, the CEO of Upgrade, a platform that provides affordable personal loans, credit monitoring and personal credit line and the founder and former CEO of LendingClub; and Noah Breslow, the CEO of OnDeck, a platform that provides small business loans and lines of credit. The panel was moderated by Habib Kairouz, the Managing Partner at Rho Capital Partners.

Before delving into the topic of online lending in the US, panelists introduced their companies and explained how they’re using data to better evaluate users’ credit scores.

Bypassing traditional banks and providing capital to small businesses

Breslow comes from a purely technical background, having studied Computer Science and Engineering at MIT. He joined OnDeck in 2007 after his former company, Tacit Networks, was sold in 2006. The idea of giving loans to small businesses without going through a bank was revolutionary for him.

“We have 6,000 banks in the US and they are largely set up to give $2 million loans to small businesses. If you needed $20,000 only, the bank would apply the same process for the $2 million loan. Six to eight weeks go by and the business would decline. The bank would look at the personal credit score then make a decision, but the challenge is it doesn’t take into account what the underlying business model is,” Breslow said.

The other challenge is if the borrower maxed out on their personal credit card, they won’t be able to get any funding from the bank to grow their business. “Digital data helped us solve this problem and build the technology to digest the digital data of the business and make a loan decision in a fraction of the time and cost it takes a traditional bank.”

OnDeck enables small business owners to apply for a loan within few minutes, evaluates their business model and makes a decision within minutes. Today, the company has 700 employees, it processed 1.6 million loan applications, made nearly $12 billion of loans with an average loan size of $50,000 and is operating in the US, Canada and Australia. It went public in 2014.

So how does its evaluation system work?

OnDeck uses third party online payment processors to monitor how a certain business is performing in the present. It then downloads transaction and payment data from the small business checking account and credit cards. The process works in real-time and provides quick analysis.

“We don’t claim to replicate traditional banking. That process is very labor-intensive and costly. A commercial bank might ask for tax returns and if you’re a small business you rarely report income on your tax returns. The data is usually stale. Today your business could be better or worse than what that data shows.”

The company also learned by trial and error. OnDeck had to lend a billion dollars’ worth of loans to have enough defaults to build a good credit score, Breslow said. The source of their capital comes from financial institutions and credit funds.

Unlocking credit potential and lowering the cost

Laplanche earned an MBA in finance, co-founded and sold a company to Oracle before he started LendingClub then Upgrade. LendingClub is an online marketplace connecting borrowers and investors, facilitating personal loans, business loans, and financing for elective medical procedures and K-12 education and tutoring.

Both platforms are online consumer credit platforms. The LendingClub started as a peer-to-peer lending platform and then evolved today to  90% of its funding from institutions and 10% from retail investors.

In addition to traditional credit scores, credit history, and performance, the company uses technology to reduce cost of capital by looking at debt ratio and behavioural data that advertisers usually use to monitor time spent on certain websites and online activity and machine learning methods to make the best out of the available data they have.

An interesting topic raised by Kairouz was the required steps to scale the model to the Middle East and specifically Lebanon and the issue of the unbanked population in many countries.

OnDeck isn’t present in the Middle East but has international businesses in Australia and Canada, and may expand to other markets in the future. The alternative online lending models can be tricky by nature, according to Breslow, and require proper infrastructure and resources in order to flourish in a certain environment. In some countries, he said, anyone without a banking license isn’t allowed to lend money to people.

There’s also the problem of accessing data. In Lebanon for instance, the only way to access credit, account and payment data is through the Central Bank and this could be a major hurdle due to banking secrecy.

Yet such hurdles can be surpassed thanks to a high mobile penetration in the Middle East, accounting for 70% of the population in 2017. Mobile-based solutions can help business owners access behavioral data directly from telecommunication companies and network operators. African-based M-Pesa and Tala are two great examples. Their users can transact, pay and apply for loans using a mobile app.

Moving to the Q&A segment, topics varied between the emergence of competitors like Goldman Sachs and tech giants; access to data in the early stages, the pressure of moving to mobile; catering to larger businesses and the future of the fintech space.

“It’s all about innovation and market size,” said Laplanche in response to the competition question. With competition comes new ideas, so we can make the market better and create better products and solutions.”

He talked about access to data in the early stages saying: “There are no shortcuts, it’s a learning curve. You start with industry data, data from credit card securitization, enhance it with credit bureau data, ask for [credit history] and how they performed in the last 3 years.”

As for Noah, they obtained data about small business activity from payment processors. Unfortunately, it was not only the loans that performed, but bad loans that didn’t perform, that were required to build their credit models. “Your credit model won’t improve unless you do this.

For us, it wasn’t until we made about a billion dollars’ worth of loans that the model started to accelerate its capabilities. Do everything you can to acquire data and bootstrap until you get to that learning phase.”

The event was attended by 40 people and exquisitely moderated by Habib Kairouz, who jokingly reminded himself and the audience that he passed on an investment opportunity with Laplanche and Breslow years ago, yet now believes in the power of what they’re doing. Perhaps online lending models are tricky due to the heavy amount data they require, but the possibilities are endless even in the least expected markets.