Five MENA startups graduate from Silicon Valley AI residency
Propeller’s Kernel Camp wraps its inaugural 8-week Bay Area cohort
#MENA #startups — Venture capital firm Propeller has completed the inaugural edition of Kernel Camp, its eight-week Silicon Valley residency, graduating five AI and deep-tech startups from Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan and Egypt. Selected from the top three percent of applicants, the cohort worked through an intensive programme of mentorship dinners, angel investor events and site visits, with access to executives and investors from OpenAI, Meta, Airbnb, JP Morgan, Lux Capital and Mozilla Ventures. The final showcase, held on 30 May, featured live pitches and a panel on the growing role of MENA talent inside Silicon Valley’s AI companies.
SO WHAT? — Kernel Camp is built on the premise that MENA founders have the technical ability but have lacked the networks that early-stage US founders take for granted. This first cohort is a proof of concept, and the fact that Propeller is already planning a second edition suggests it worked.
KEY POINTS:
Propeller graduated five startups from the inaugural Kernel Camp cohort, an eight-week Silicon Valley residency. The startup cohort worked through an intensive programme of mentorship dinners, angel investor events and site visits, with access to executives and investors from OpenAI, Meta, Airbnb, JP Morgan, Lux Capital and Mozilla Ventures.
: OORB (Tunisia), Techbible (Morocco), FirstFlow (Jordan), Nexguards (Egypt) and Flowbrave (Morocco), all selected from the top three percent of applicants.
The graduated startups are:
FirstFlow (Jordan) - an in-chat onboarding platform that guides users from first message to full adoption of AI agents.
Flowbrave (Morocco) - turns static business processes into dynamic, AI-guided workflows, eliminating the ‘Execution Gap’.
Nexguards (Egypt) - runs AI-powered social engineering simulations and personalised security awareness training for enterprises.
OORB (Tunisia) - robotics observability platform that captures every robot run, scores reliability and identifies what changed when behaviour breaks.
Techbible (Morocco) - maps every SaaS tool and AI agent inside a company, tracking spend, usage and renewals to identify ungoverned AI tool costs.
Throughout the residency, founders attended weekly mentorship dinners with executives from Airbnb, Meta, OpenAI, JP Morgan, Cartesia, Rho, Lux Capital, Mozilla Ventures, Plug and Play and Mentors Fund.
The cohort held a dedicated angel investor event at Silicon Valley Bank’s offices on Sand Hill Road, giving the five companies direct access to Bay Area angels.
The final showcase on 30 May included a fireside chat with Writer CTO and co-founder Waseem Alshikh, and a panel featuring Ahmed Rashad of Perle AI and Ahmad Saddedin of YC-backed Corgea.
Propeller is already preparing a second Kernel Camp cohort and manages a $50 million Fund III focused on early-stage AI infrastructure and software startups across the US and MENA.
ZOOM OUT — In November 2025, Propeller launched Fund III, a $50 million vehicle targeting seed to pre-Series A startups in AI infrastructure and AI-native software. The Jordan-founded firm built the fund around a specific thesis: that MENA technical talent and US market opportunity are underconnected, and that the gap is closeable with the right cross-border infrastructure. At the time of the announcement, Propeller had already put capital to work in five US-focused companies from the new fund, including developer tooling firm Codemod, networking startup Netpreme and cybersecurity companies Stealthium and Ciphero AI. The fund's earlier two vehicles, backed by Saudi Venture Capital Company and Jordan's Innovative Startups and SMEs Fund, built a portfolio of more than 30 startups including Clarity, ActivePieces and Maqsam. Fund III concentrates on horizontal AI infrastructure from silicon-adjacent technologies through to enterprise workflows, and backing only founders who are thinking about global scale from day one. Propeller now operates across Amman, Riyadh, Boston and Silicon Valley.
[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]
Source: Propeller
Read more about Propeller:
Propeller launches $50 million fund for AI infrastructure (Middle East AI News)