Radi El Fassed

Radi El Fassed is a telecom executive turned entrepreneurship-ecosystem builder with roughly 15 years in the international telecommunications industry. He holds an MSc in Applied Physics from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Early in his career he held product management and business-development roles at AT&T and Lucent Technologies across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and advised major operators including Orange Group, Vodafone, T-Mobile and Telefónica on network transformation. He later served as Marketing Director at the Palestinian Telecommunications Group, and in 2010 joined Zain Jordan as Data Strategy Director — subsequently Business Marketing Director — where he helped reposition the operator from a mobile-only to an integrated operator serving Jordan's largest enterprises.

Around 2011–2013 he moved into the startup world as Vice President of Business Development at MENA Apps, a MENA-focused venture builder founded in 2011 by telecom, applications, media and banking professionals that deployed roughly $3.5 million across ~15 companies. In that role he drove the firm's expansion into North Africa — Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt (with Algeria and Libya under consideration) — with the explicit aim of connecting entrepreneurs across the region to mentors and investors.

He is best known as Co-Founder and Program Director of Arabreneur, the not-for-profit Arab entrepreneurship initiative launched in 2013 and headquartered in Amman with a flagship program in Ramallah, Palestine. Arabreneur pairs USAID-funded operations with profit-seeking angel investment to bridge the gap between incubator graduation and venture-capital readiness, offering acceleration, co-working space, mentorship and seed capital. It ran quarterly pitch events and helped seed the Pal Angels angel network. More recently, El Fassed has served as Chief Operating Officer of ULAP (ULAP Networks), a cross-border enterprise communications-infrastructure company founded in 2017 and based in Brunei.

• Invests at the seed stage in early-stage MENA tech startups, typically writing checks in the ~$100k–$110k range and often syndicating with co-investors.
• Targets companies that have graduated an incubator but are not yet ready for institutional VC, explicitly aiming to "bridge the gap between incubator graduation and venture capital readiness."
• Sector appetite spans e-commerce, cloud computing, fintech/online payments, new media, mobile apps and digital services.
• Geographic thesis is regional integration: connect "entrepreneurs in Morocco with entrepreneurs in Jordan and Egypt so they can ask each other questions, or find mentors, or look for an investor in Dubai."
• Emphasis on job creation and social-economic impact — the Palestinian program was designed to graduate 8–10 startups a year and generate 50–100 jobs annually, backed by a targeted $2.5M seed fund.