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Tactful AI, the Cairo-based startup building infrastructure for agentic customer experience (CX), has secured an undisclosed investment from Hatem Dowidar, the former Group CEO of UAE-based telecom giant e&.
The investment is part of an extension of Tactful’s pre-Series A round announced in February 2026, in which the company raised $1 million, co-led by Foras AI and M Empire. The pre-Series A round also saw participation from DeepTech angel investors, including Omar Gabr, co-founder of Luciq (formerly Instabug); Mohamed Samir, founder of Si-Bits; and Ahmed Fakhry, co-founder of Infinilink. The company plans to raise a Series A in 2027.
“Enterprises across the region are actively seeking practical, reliable solutions to integrate AI into their customer operations safely and at scale,” said Hatem Dowidar.
Dowidar brings more than 25 years of experience in telecommunications and technology. He joined the Etisalat group in 2015 as Group Chief Operating Officer and served as Group CEO from 2020 to March 2026. Before that, he spent 16 years at Vodafone, including as CEO of Vodafone Egypt, and now serves on the board of Mobily, Leia Inc., and BlackRock Frontiers Investment Trust PLC.
“Very few leaders share his depth of understanding and strategic clarity regarding what large enterprises require before trusting new, customer-facing technologies. His support and trust come at a pivotal moment as we take our boldest step yet toward defining a new era of agentic AI-driven customer experience,” said Mohamed Elmasry, co-founder and CEO of Tactful AI.
Founded in 2016 by Elmasry and Mohamed Hassan, Tactful AI is an Egyptian-born CX platform that helps companies move from traditional automation to agentic execution, allowing AI agents to resolve customer requests end-to-end within defined operational controls. The company has been built from the ground up by engineers with roots in semiconductor design and enterprise software.
Its platform brings omnichannel engagement, orchestration, analytics, automation, governance, and agentic AI together in one place. It enables enterprises to manage customer interactions in real time across all digital channels while significantly improving the productivity of customer service teams through smart automation across the retail, e-commerce, hospitality, and finance sectors.
The company has had a notable journey. In 2022, Tactful AI was acquired by Dstny, a leading European provider of business communication tools, as part of the Belgian firm’s strategy to expand into AI-powered CX. However, the founders subsequently reacquired full ownership in 2025, repositioning the company for independent growth.
“Tactful has successfully deployed this infrastructure in live production environments. Seeing the capabilities of their next-generation technology convinced me that this team has everything it takes to set the industry benchmark, both regionally and globally,” Dowidar added.
Since January 2025, Tactful says annual recurring revenue has grown 11.7x, while the volume of customer conversations the platform handles each month has grown 32x over the same period. To date, the company says it has processed over 130 million customer engagements, and customers include Elaraby Group, Raneen, 2B, Lucky One, Erada Finance and Simplex.
Tactful AI said the proceeds from the pre-Series A round will strengthen growth in the Egyptian market, validate expansion into new EMEA markets, and accelerate R&D to enhance the platform’s agentic capabilities, scalability, and integrations.
