Manarway Puts an AI Tutor and 3D Labs on Iraqi Students' Phones

Riadh Al Zubaidi left Iraq as a teenager and reached France as a refugee. He trained as a space engineer and worked at Airbus. The students who stayed behind were never far from his thinking, and Manarway, the AI-powered learning platform he co-founded and leads as chief executive, is what he built for them.

The platform launched officially in October 2026. Its starting point was a 2025 encounter in London, thousands of miles from Iraq, where Al Zubaidi met Ramez Chedly, who had already built more than 12 education businesses that now reach over 300,000 users. Al Zubaidi put the question to him directly: where could an engineer with his background be useful? The pointer he got back was AI applied to teaching.

Iraqi classrooms, Al Zubaidi says, have few laboratories, little interactivity and theory piled on top of theory. That pattern holds across the region but bites harder in Iraq, where students study for the exam without understanding the material, because they never see it or practise it. He wanted to carry over the interactive quality of the education he received in Europe. Airbus shaped his standards, he says, because in space nothing is permitted to fail. An MBA at EDHEC, one of France's leading business schools, gave him the commercial side, and earlier work on telecom partnerships at a Fortune 500 company is what he expects to draw on to scale. Manarway sits where those strands meet.

The product is meant to move past textbook-led instruction. It combines an AI assistant, interactive lessons and game-like elements. As an engineer, Al Zubaidi learned by watching how a system behaves — models, simulations, tests — rather than by memorisation. That is why the platform is built around 3D models, virtual labs, stories a student can discuss with the AI, and audio narration for every word of a lesson.

On quality, the team made a deliberate choice. It did not feed textbooks into a model and call the result a tutor. Iraqi teachers on the staff rewrote the official curriculum chapter by chapter for digital delivery, and doing that for Iraq alone took a full year. The AI tutor is anchored in that rewritten material, so its answers stay inside what the student will be examined on. Science and technology labs are built with current AI models and refreshed as curricula and tools change.

The first subject out of the gate is English. The official Iraqi English curriculum was reworked into something more interactive, with an AI speaking coach that lets students practise talking every day rather than drilling grammar for an exam. English, Al Zubaidi notes, is the door to international universities, scholarships, remote work and the wider internet. The 3D courses follow. "When a student turns a cell in 3D, takes it apart and asks the AI tutor why, they learn to ask questions," he says. "That habit is what universities and employers look for."

When a student turns a cell in 3D, takes it apart and asks the AI tutor why, they learn to ask questions,

Every student also gets what amounts to a private tutor on a phone, in Arabic and English, at any hour. That kind of help is currently a luxury reserved for families who can pay for it. Al Zubaidi frames the gap in geographic terms: if a student in Basra can study the way a student in Dubai or Paris does, their options after school change. "Some of them will build the next Iraqi startups," he says.

Delivering that requires people in several places at once. Teachers and account managers sit in Iraq, other team members are in France, and technical operations run across North Africa and Thailand. In the first two weeks after launch the platform logged more than 500 sign-ups and close to 6,000 website visitors, while its social media content drew over 122,000 views. Al Zubaidi, a former Airbus professional, argues his technical training is what makes wider access to decent teaching feasible at all.

The laboratory problem is where he makes his case most plainly. Many public schools have no lab of any kind, and classes are too large for a teacher to walk every student through an experiment. "On Manarway, the lab is on the phone," he says. A student can open a cell in 3D and pick out the nucleus and the chloroplasts, or slide a candle and a lens along an optical bench and watch the image flip. Biology, physics, chemistry and maths labs are being rolled out now. About 90% of the features work without an internet connection. The precedent he wants to set is narrow and concrete: no student should be told science is out of reach because their school lacks a lab. If a phone can carry both the lab and the tutor, resources stop being the excuse.

Money has so far come entirely from Al Zubaidi himself — personal savings, plus both of his cars sold to keep the venture moving. No outside round has been raised. The startup has joined the NVIDIA Inception programme, and it won a place at LEAP, Saudi Arabia's largest technology event, from a field of more than 2,000 applicants. Al Zubaidi is also working through the entry process for an international UNESCO competition on education and science.

Building in Iraq brings difficulties that are structural rather than technical. Procedures move slowly and are not designed with startups in mind, he says, and some requirements — a figure of about $150,000 attached to an education platform — reward size over quality. Backing for private startups has yet to materialise, and a culture of learning by rote will take time to shift. One of the region's largest telecom operators has confirmed it is willing to partner; the paperwork is still being worked through.

The ambition runs past Iraq. Al Zubaidi began there because he is financing Manarway himself, but he is explicit that the target is the wider region. Within five to seven years he wants the platform to change how students across the Middle East study. Adapting the system to a new country's curriculum takes roughly two months, which he treats as evidence the method can travel. The stated goal is a generation that understands its material instead of memorising for exams, on the argument that students who understand can innovate and build. Once revenue allows, a non-profit arm will take the same material into refugee camps.

His own measure of success is smaller than that. "Success for me is a student in a crowded school, with only a phone, who understands, passes exams and gets into a good university," he says. "As an Iraqi who left as a teenager, that is how I want to invest in my country: in the students who stayed."