Laith Zraikat

by Arzan VC | Aug 20, 2016 | Team

Laith Zraikat

Venture Partner

Laith founded his first startup in 1997 to bring more people and businesses in Jordan onto the World Wide Web. Three years later that pivoted into what became one of the most notable startups in the Arab World; Jeeran.com. As Co-founder of Jeeran from 2000, Laith served many roles while shaping and executing the company’s product vision, and growing its user base from a handful of friends to nearly 7M users. As Jeeran matured, he decided to leave in 2012 and pursue his true passion, working with startups. Since then he has advised and mentored many startups in product and technical areas. A self-taught technologist and a geek at heart, Laith enjoys working closely with passionate developers and designers on new and bold ideas. He still codes almost daily, and speaks fluent Arabic, English, Objective-C, PHP, C#, JavaScript, SQL, CSS, HTML, and a little bit of Python. Laith holds a Bachelor of Dental Surgery from the University of Jordan.

Eyad M. Albayouk

by Arzan VC | Aug 20, 2016 | Team

Eyad M. Albayouk

Principal

Prior to joining Arzan VC, Eyad was a Portfolio Manager at Sanabil Investments, investing in private equity, venture capital, and real assets. Eyad previously served on the Board of Directors of Virgin Mobile KSA, a Sanabil portfolio company.

In parallel to his role with Arzan VC, Eyad also currently serves as General Manager at AlwanMed, a pharmaceutical and medical supplies distribution business in KSA. The company is a fully staffed SME headquartered in Riyadh, KSA with offices in Jeddah. Eyad began his professional career working for Ernst & Young’s audit team in Riyadh.

He completed an MBA from the University of Oxford, a Master of Accounting from the University of Southern California (USC), and a dual BSc in Accounting and Finance from USC.

Ahmad Takatkah

by Arzan VC | Aug 20, 2016 | Team

Ahmad Takatkah

Senior Investment Manager

Ahmad is a Senior Investment Manager at Arzan VC focusing on early growth and high growth stage technology startups. Prior to joining Arzan VC, Ahmad was an advisor for the MIT Arab Enterprise Forum and he was a founding team member of two Arab VC firms. He has more than 10 years of experience. Ahmad is also a member of Endeavor Global Investor Network, and a judge and mentor at MIT Arab Startup competition, Microsoft Innovation Center (Jordan), Queen Rania National Entrepreneurship Competition (QRNEC), Startup Weekend (Amman, Cairo, Riyadh), ArabNet Startup Demo, Creative Business Cup (CBC), Seed Startup Accelerator, Oasis500 Accelerator, and iPark Incubator. Ahmad is one of the foremost VC Bloggers in the Middle East, and he blogs on VCpreneur.com. He is a Kauffman Fellow, and he went to Harvard’s VC training program. Ahmad holds an MBA from New York Institute of Technology (NYIT), and a B.Sc. degree in Electronics Engineering from Princess Sumaya University of Technology (PUST).

Hasan J. Zainal

by Arzan VC | Aug 20, 2016 | Team

Hasan J. Zainal

Partner

Hasan Zainal founded Arzan VC in June 2013, bringing with him 9 years of investment and operational experience. In his years of experience, Hasan have co-founded different businesses and was instrumental in building the right teams to manage the growth prospects of each company. Hasan worked in Global Investment House in their Private Equity Department. He was a team member in both the transaction and due diligence team. Prior to establishing Arzan VC, Hasan co-founded Edge Foods and lead its operations for three years. He currently sits on the boards of Al Amanah Holding, Edge Foods, BBK Geojit Securities, Kuwait Prospects and Mesk Holdings. Hasan earned his bachelor degree from Purdue University and he is a CFA Level III candidate.

Mohamad Charafeddine

by Arzan VC | Aug 20, 2016 | Team

Mohamad Charafeddine

Advisory Member

Mr. Mohamad is a VP of Product at Careem. He previously worked in Core ML at Facebook and prior to that he used to be a Director R&D AI Lab at Samsung SDS Research America in the Silicon Valley, where he worked on the analytics transformation of businesses through machine learning. Prior to Samsung, he was a Principal Solutions Architect at ASSIA, a Stanford spin-off startup, where he built big data mining software to diagnose and optimize entire access network for telcos. He joined ASSIA as one of its founding core R&D team, helped it build its first commercial product, and scale up to manage 15% of the world’s fixed broadband.

Mr. Mohamad holds a bachelor degree from the American University of Beirut (AUB) and a master and PhD degree from Stanford University, all in Electrical Engineering. In addition, he holds an MBA from Berkeley Haas School of Business. He writes on ideas, technology and business on Twitter and Medium @mohamadtweets.

Rami Khaled Ali

by Arzan VC | Aug 20, 2016 | Team

Rami Khaled Ali

Advisory Member

Mr. Rami Ali is the Group Financial Controller since 2006. He mainly leads the valuations and negotiations for the potential investments of IFA group. Earlier, he has held the position of Senior in Charge at Grant Thorton (Kuwait). He sits on the board of First Takaful Insurance, EFG – Hermes IFA Brokerage and Arzan Financial Group. He earned his MBA from George Washington University. He also earned his CFA, CPA and CMA.