OUR FOUNDER OF THE WEEK- Ahmed Mahmoud, Co-founder, and CEO of DXwand (LinkedIn).

My name is Ahmed Mahmoud and I am the CEO and co-founder of DXwand. I’ve been working in tech for 19 years. I studied computer engineering at Ain Shams University and knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur ever since graduating from university.

I noticed there was a gap in the market for conversation AI for Arabic dialects during my time at Microsoft working on digital transformation for several enterprise customers. Conversation AI solutions from Silicon Valley, or the west in general, were ineffective with Arabic because there are so many dialects. I realized this was a niche that western tech companies were not focused on, so we began working on DXwand and joined the Lean Startup Program. We were awarded a grant during the demo day of the accelerator program. Shortly after DXwand signed its first client in 2019, I resigned from Microsoft and fully dedicated myself to the company.

DXwand is a B2B experience management solution for conversations. We started the company to deliver machine learning that provides three main services to our clients. The first is to automate conversations in an intuitive way, whether these are voice conversations via a call center or text conversations on platforms like Facebook or WhatsApp. Secondly, it gives companies real-time insights through dashboards, which gathers information from conversations such as recurring issues customers are facing with a product or service or if customers are inquiring about products that the company does not offer. These insights help companies make decisions that address issues customers are facing with products faster and release products that meet consumer demands.

The final thing we provide is a customer data platform that extracts demographics from conversations. Typically, call centers can only see your number and your name if you provide it, so that’s the information that is stored in their database. We extract further information from conversations with clients and add them to the database: For example if a customer is speaking to a telecom company and mentions that the internet is down and his kids can’t access their online classes, it picks up on that. Then it adds to the database the fact that the customer is a parent so that later, if the company has a new offer that parents would be more interested in, they can look up those customers and proactively reach out to them.

Our language agnostic conversational AI and digital assistant tool is really our USP. We don't depend on language models. The majority of solutions on the market work on language models that are trained to pick out names and verbs from sentences. We use a language diagnostic approach, which offers deep learning algorithms and model training services that learn from the language and dialect that you provide.

It works with any spoken language as long as there is sufficient data to use for learning. In Egypt alone, we have more than five spoken dialects. A lot of the spoken languages are a mix of languages that are entirely different from the official textbook language and in order to accommodate them the machine has to have the ability to learn. We even uploaded the minion's language from the movie (which is a fully registered language) and it worked.

It was not easy to get to this stage. It took us years to reach the level we are at today, but now we can adapt to any changes in language in any country.

Some of the KPIs I look at consistently are new signups, revenues, and machine learning confidence and recall, which tells me if we’re on the right track or if we need to add more data or different algorithms. I also look at conversations over time. They tell us if people are engaged or disengaged. Revenue vs new revenue is something I also pay attention to as well it lets us know whether we’re penetrating the market or making money off of the same clients.

To date, DXwand has raised around USD 2 mn. We recently raised USD 1 mn in a pre-series A investment round led by Huashan Capital. We also had angel investors from Egypt in our recent round. With our new funding, we want to focus on regional expansion and on setting a higher barrier to entry, for competition by accelerating our product development and research.

If I had only enough money to do one thing, I would spend it on team growth. Growth in terms of competency, learning, and satisfaction. I would focus on that because I know that if your team is treated well, trained properly, and has the right mindset then you don't need to worry about anything else.

I enjoy listening to audiobooks in my spare time: I really enjoyed Masters of Scale. You can learn a lot from successful entrepreneurs' experiences. I also like to play ping pong and spend time with my kids.

I think Rabbit and Breadfast are two startups that are killing it. What I really found impressive about Rabbit is that they cracked the code in no time. The process was very fast from the moment they received their funding to building an app, to when they began delivering orders, and they always meet their SLA of delivering orders in under 20 minutes.