Argument · 23 September 2026 · 5 min read
An AUB trained engineer decides which MIT spin-offs get money. A Lebanese-Canadian woman runs an American AI company that raised two hundred million dollars in a single round. Neither of them appears on this register. That is a fact about us, not about them.
The usual way to write about Lebanese technology is to start from what is missing. No funding, no electricity, no banking system, no exits. It is an honest list and everybody who has tried to build here can recite it from memory.
It also produces a false picture, because it describes the country and then quietly implies the people. And the people are not missing. In at least two cases the people are sitting where the decisions get made.
Habib Haddad is a Lebanese entrepreneur who grew up north of Beirut. He took a degree at the American University of Beirut and a masters at the University of Southern California. In 2007 he co-founded Yamli, a tool that let people type Arabic using Latin characters and have it transliterated as they went. In May 2012 Yahoo acquired a licence to Yamli’s technology for Yahoo Maktoob, and Yamli carried on operating as it was.
Read the date again. Arabic transliteration, shipped as a working consumer product, in 2007.
He was also the founding chief executive of Wamda, a venture platform for startups across the Middle East and North Africa.
What he does now is the part that should stop a reader.
He is the founding managing partner of the E14 Fund, which backs, in the fund’s own words, AI and deep tech founders from MIT and beyond.
Strip the politeness out of that sentence. A Lebanese engineer sits at one of the points where research coming out of MIT turns into a funded company or does not. He is not asking for access. He allocates it.
L’Orient Today describes May Habib as Lebanese-Canadian. In 2015 she and Waseem AlShikh incorporated Qordoba in the United States, a language and localisation platform. In August 2020 the same two founders started Writer.
On 12 November 2024, Writer announced a 200 million dollar Series C at a 1.9 billion dollar valuation. The round was co-led by Premji Invest, Radical Ventures and existing investor ICONIQ Growth. The participating investors included Adobe Ventures, B Capital, Citi Ventures, IBM Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and Workday Ventures, with existing investors Accenture, Balderton, Insight Partners and Vanguard also supporting it.
Those are not names that turn up for a good story. Five of them, Adobe, Citi, IBM, Salesforce and Workday, are the venture arms of companies that could have built the product themselves and decided to invest instead.
| Figure | Value | Standing |
|---|---|---|
| Writer Series C | 200 million dollars | Company statement |
| Writer valuation at that round | 1.9 billion dollars | Company statement |
| Date of announcement | 12 November 2024 | Company statement |
| Qordoba incorporated | 2015, United States | Third party |
| Writer founded | August 2020 | Third party |
| Yamli founded | 2007 | Third party |
| Yamli technology licensed to Yahoo | May 2012 | Reported at the time |
Not that the diaspora should come home. That argument is old, it has not worked, and it asks people to trade a functioning country for a broken one out of sentiment.
The argument is narrower and harder to wave away.
This register exists to record Lebanese artificial intelligence. Neither of the two people above is on it.
That is not because they were judged and left off. It is because a register that only counts what happens inside the country’s borders was always going to miss the people who left and then went on to decide things. We have been building a national list for a thing that stopped being national some time ago.
So the correction is ours to make, in public, where it can be checked. The builders page takes Lebanese founders wherever they are. Applying that consistently means these names belong on it, and the absence gets fixed rather than explained.
We are not claiming either of them owes Lebanon anything, and we have not asked them for a comment. Nothing here comes from them. Every line above was read off a public page, and each one is listed at the bottom with what it supports.
We are also not claiming these two are the only ones. We searched for Lebanese founders and investors operating at this level in artificial intelligence and these are the two we could verify to a standard we were willing to print. There will be others we have not found, and the register is the place to correct that.
One note on the numbers. Sources disagree on several points, and where they do we say so rather than quietly settle it.
On Qordoba’s founding, one published company profile dates the founding to 2013 while the encyclopaedia entry and the founder profile both give 2015. We have used 2015 and marked it third party.
On Yamli, the encyclopaedia entry and the fund biography describe a Yahoo acquisition. The reports from the time of the deal describe a licence of the technology. We use the wording from the time.
On Habib Haddad’s title, this piece first published on 23 September 2026 describing him as president and managing director of the E14 Fund, which is the wording of his encyclopaedia entry. The fund’s own page gives founding managing partner. We have corrected it to the fund’s wording the same day, because a company’s own page outranks a third party entry about it.
On 28 September 2026 we corrected three points after rechecking the primary pages. This piece first said Yahoo acquired Yamli in 2012; the reports from the time, Wamda and The Next Web on 28 May 2012, describe Yahoo acquiring a licence to Yamli’s technology, with Yamli carrying on as it was. It first gave Habib Haddad’s birth year and place, which rest on a single unsourced encyclopaedia line, so they have been removed. And it said four of the participating investors were corporate venture arms; Writer’s release lists five, Adobe, Citi, IBM, Salesforce and Workday. We also removed the years given for his time at Wamda, which rest on a single encyclopaedia entry, and now cite Knowledge at Wharton and The National for his Lebanese background and L’Orient Today for May Habib’s.
Figures we found on a single aggregated profile and nowhere else, including headcounts and customer names for Qordoba, are not printed here at all.
Sources
Written for Club Cedro. If something here is wrong, say so and it gets corrected with the correction left visible.
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