Mostafa Ashour

Mostafa Ashour began his professional career as a software engineer at IBM. In 2005, he decided to delve into the adventure of creating a technology startup. Driven by passion for both software development and gaming, he co-founded Khayal Interactive Entertainment, one of the pioneer game development studios in the MENA region. During his work at Khayal, he developed the nV Physics SDK, and launched the first 3D game to target the MENA region (Abo Hadeed). The game received over 1M user activations and was sponsored by Intel and TE Data. In August 2008, he joined Microsoft as a Program Manager where he was one of the main drivers behind Microsoft Maren and has contributed to building technologies that shipped in Office, Bing, and Microsoft Translator. He was identified as a high potential Microsoft employee (HiPo) and selected for the emerging leader Bench program, a career acceleration program that identifies the company's top 5%. In 2013, he decided to go back to the startup scene and co-founded Tryvin, a mobile development startup where he sold its first product Resume Designer Pro to French-based Akkad. Mostafa is now the founder of NowPay, a 500 startups company that focuses on financial-wellness. Mostafa is experienced in startups and managing incubation teams and currently holds two patents. He authored one of the first books about startups in MENA. Aside from his profession, he likes reading, football, and was regularly among Egypt's Taekwondo champions for more than 10 years.