Five MENA startups complete Propeller's Silicon Valley program

Published: 2026-07-01T11:49:48.000Z

The perennial complaint about the region's technology talent is not that it lacks ability, but that it lacks the doors. Propeller is trying to close that gap. The MENA rooted venture firm has concluded the first edition of Kernel Camp, graduating five deep tech startups from Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan and Egypt after an eight week Silicon Valley residency.

The perennial complaint about the region's technology talent is not that it lacks ability, but that it lacks the doors. Brilliant engineers emerge from Tunis, Casablanca, Amman and Cairo every year, yet the networks, mentors and capital that turn a clever prototype into a global company have long sat an ocean away. Propeller, a venture capital firm with roots in the MENA region, is trying to close that gap, and it has just wrapped up the first attempt. The firm has concluded the inaugural edition of Kernel Camp, an eight week Silicon Valley residency, graduating five deep tech startups drawn from Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan and Egypt from what it says was the top 3 per cent of applicants. The program's design speaks directly to the problem it is trying to solve. Rather than a remote accelerator or a short study tour, Kernel Camp embedded its founders physically in the Bay Area for two months, with fully sponsored housing, curated workshops, weekly guest sessions and one to one office hours with experienced builders. During the residency the founders received mentorship from executives, operators and investors tied to organizations including OpenAI, Meta, Airbnb, JP Morgan, Lux Capital, Mozilla Ventures and Plug and Play, and they made site visits to leading technology companies to see first hand the cultures and operating environments behind some of the world's most influential AI businesses. The point, as partner Hani Azzam put it, was never whether MENA founders could compete globally, but giving them the environment to prove it. The five graduates themselves sit squarely at the frontier of AI infrastructure, developer tooling and cybersecurity, which is telling in itself. OORB, from Tunisia, is building a robotics observability platform that captures every robot run, scores reliability and pinpoints what changed when behavior breaks. Techbible, from Morocco, offers an AI stack manager that maps a company's SaaS tools and AI agents, tracking spend, usage and renewals. FirstFlow, from Jordan, provides an onboarding and analytics layer for AI agents, while Nexguards, from Egypt, runs a personalized cyber attack simulation and security awareness platform, and Flowbrave, also from Morocco, turns static business processes into AI guided workflows. These are not consumer apps chasing quick downloads but infrastructure plays aimed at other businesses, the kind of technically demanding work that rewards exactly the immersion Kernel Camp offers. The firm behind the program gives it credibility and staying power. Founded in 2017 by managing partner Zaid Farekh and also led by Azzam, Propeller invests in early stage AI infrastructure and software startups across the United States and MENA, operating from Amman, Riyadh, Boston and Silicon Valley, and it launched Kernel Camp as a core pillar of the cross border strategy tied to its 50 million dollar Fund III. The final showcase, held on 30 May, featured live pitches and a panel on the growing influence of MENA talent within Silicon Valley itself, and Propeller says it is already preparing the next edition, signaling this is meant to be an annual pipeline rather than a one off. The regional thread is the whole point. Across the Middle East and North Africa, and increasingly in North Africa specifically, deep tech founders are producing globally relevant work but still struggle to plug into the Silicon Valley networks that accelerate the world's most ambitious companies. Programs that physically bridge that distance, carrying founders from Tunis or Amman into the heart of the Bay Area, are a small but meaningful part of how the region converts its abundant technical talent into companies that can compete on a global stage.