Habib Haddad is a serial entrepreneur and early stage investor. He is currently the president and managing director of the that invests in spin-offs from MIT. Investments include Thruwave, Formlabs, Kiwi, Figur8, Affectiva, Wise Systems.. Haddad has founded a number of tech companies including Wamda, Yamli, YallaStartup, and others. He has also been an activist on various social issues in the Middle East, specifically in Lebanon. He has been named by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader in 2009 and as a top innovator under 35 by the MIT Technology Review. Haddad's work in the MENA region is credited with playing a key role in strengthening its entrepreneurship ecosystem.
Haddad is currently the president and managing director of the that invests in spin-offs from MIT such as Formlabs, Affectiva, Soofa, TulipSystems and others. In 2004, Haddad was a founding engineer at an image based modeling software company Mok3 as a venture backed spinoff from MIT CSAIL, where he served until 2005 and joined ATI as a senior software engineer. In 2006, he founded Relief Lebanon to support relief efforts during the 2006 war in Lebanon. The grass root effort was featured by the "101 Stories to Tell" initiative by the UNDP in February 2009. In 2007, Haddad founded Yamli, the leading Arabictransliteration and smart search engine. In 2012, Yahoo! acquired a license to Yamli's technologies. Yamli has been praised for empowering and re-energizing the Arabic language online. In 2009, Haddad along with two other Middle East technology entrepreneurs, founded, YallaStartup, an NGO that aims to foster early stage entrepreneurship and startup creation. It was one of the first support organizations for MENA Entrepreneurs. In 2011 he co-created Alive.in, a website that brought 1000 volunteers to transcribe and translate voicemails from the Egyptian protesters after the government shutdown of the internet. He started the company when Google and Twitter launched a project to allow people to leave a voice mail that will be then put on Twitter, Haddad came up with an idea to crowd source translation of those voices in real time from Arabic to other languages. From 2012 to 2016, he was the founding CEO of Wamda, a platform of programs and networks that aims to accelerate entrepreneurship ecosystems across the MENA region. He also served as a venture partner of Wamda Capital, a growth capital VC fund, with investments in startups like taxi-hailing app Careem and LittleBits
Awards
2009: The World Economic Forum recognized Haddad as a Young Global Leader. 30 under 30 Most Powerful Arabs, Arabian Business.
2011: Named as a Top Innovator under 35 by the MIT Technology Review.
