Overview

Gender

male

Investor Type

Investment Partner,Angel

Investor Stage

Seed

Habib is a tech entrepreneur and angel investor, recently turned VC. He is currently the CEO of Wamda.com and the managing partner of Wamda Capital. He founded Yamli.com the Arabic search and transliteration startup that licensed its technology to Yahoo. He also started a number of non-profits including YallaStartup, INLET and ReliefLebanon.

In 2009, the World Economic Forum recognized Habib as a Young Global Leader and the ArabianBusiness named him one of the top 30 influential Arabs under 30 as well as of the most 500 powerful Arabs. He currently serves on the Global Agenda Council on innovation. He is an advisor to several US and Middle Eastern startups and non-profits.

Habib is behind the original idea behind Yamli, and today drives Yamli's vision of empowering the Arabic language and users on the web. His responsibilities span from product strategy and design to business development. The World Economic Forum recently recognized Habib as a Young Global Leader for 2009.

Prior to Yamli, he worked as a senior engineer at ATI (later acquired by AMD); and before that he was part of the early engineering team at Mok3 (now Everyscape), a startup out of the MIT CSAIL lab.

Habib co-founded INLET (International Network of Lebanese Entrepreneurs and Technologists), an organization geared towards promoting entrepreneurship and leadership for the Arab world in general and Lebanon in particular. He also founded Relief Lebanon, a grass roots effort aimed at supporting the relief operations in Lebanon during the July 2006 war. Relief Lebanon was featured by the "101 Stories to Tell" initiative by the UNDP in February 2009.

Habib often speaks about early stage development and entrepreneurship, and has spoken at venues such as the Harvard Business School, Boston College and the American University of Beirut. He currently sits on the advisory board of Meedan, a non-profit startup that aims to enable cross-cultural dialogs online.

Habib holds a Bachelor of Computer and Communication Engineering from the American University in Beirut and a Masters in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California.