Tactful AI brings in former e& chief Hatem Dowidar as investor
The former e& group CEO has taken a direct stake in an extension of the Cairo-based startup's pre-Series A round, ahead of a planned 2027 Series A.
Anecdoted Desk Anecdoted Desk covers rolling funding rounds and startup news across the UAE and MENA -- the wire for deals as they're announced. team@anecdoted.com
Tactful AI has added Hatem Dowidar, the former group chief executive of e&, to its investor base through a direct investment in an extension of its pre-Series A round. The size of the stake was not disclosed.
Dowidar ran e& as group CEO from 2020 until March 2026, having joined the operator as chief operating officer in 2015. Before that he spent 16 years in executive roles at Vodafone, including a spell as CEO of Vodafone Egypt. That adds up to roughly a quarter-century in telecommunications and technology leadership.
The extension follows the Egyptian company's initial pre-Series A round, announced in February 2026 and co-led by Foras AI and M Empire. Tactful AI was founded in 2016 by Mohamed Elmasry and Mohamed Hassan and sells an agentic AI platform for customer experience. Businesses use it to manage customer interactions, automate workflows and analyse conversations across multiple channels. The company runs teams in Cairo and in Cambridge, UK.
Elmasry, the co-founder and CEO, said Dowidar has spent more than 25 years leading large technology companies that serve millions of customers across the Middle East and Africa, and that few executives match his grasp of what big enterprises require before they put new customer-facing technology into service. He framed the backing as arriving at a critical point for the company's agentic ambitions.
Dowidar said enterprises in the region are looking for practical, dependable ways to bring AI into customer operations safely and at scale. He cited Tactful AI's infrastructure already running in live production environments, and said the next-generation technology persuaded him the team could set a benchmark for the industry both regionally and globally.
That next platform, which the company intends to launch, is built to let enterprises create and modify end-to-end customer experience workflows in hours rather than months, while keeping human oversight and approval at every step. Tactful AI said the technology extends unified infrastructure already proven in production, and that more technical detail will be released in the coming months.
The company reports an 11.7x rise in annual recurring revenue since January 2025 and a 32x jump in monthly customer conversations processed on its platform over the same period. Its client list includes Elaraby Group, Raneen, 2B, Lucky One, Erada Finance and Simplex.
Most AI deployed in customer service today stops at answering routine questions. Building a full workflow — routing, escalation, sign-offs, analytics, changes over time — is where enterprise projects tend to stall, because each adjustment drags in engineering work and lengthy review. Tactful AI's platform bundles engagement, orchestration, governance, analytics, advanced automation and agentic AI, and the company expects the coming shift in agentic capability to move the needle on operational agility and how quickly enterprises respond to their own customers.
Dowidar's arrival gives Tactful AI an operator with experience selling into large telecom and enterprise buyers, which is the same audience it now courts for production deployments. The company says it will build on that momentum ahead of a Series A round planned for 2027.
