Egyptian agentic AI customer-experience startup Tactful AI has secured investment from Hatem Dowidar, the former group chief executive of UAE telecoms group e&, as an extension of its pre-Series A round.
The amount was not disclosed. Tactful raised $1 million in February in a round co-led by Foras AI and M Empire.
Dowidar led e& from 2020 until March 2026, having joined as chief operating officer in 2015. Before that he spent 16 years in executive roles at Vodafone, including as chief executive of Vodafone Egypt.
From acquisition back to independence
Founded by Mohamed Elmasry, Mohammad Hassan and Sherif Khairallah, Tactful offers a single platform for businesses to manage and understand customer journeys across channels. It was acquired by European communications company Dstny in 2022, then bought back by its founders in July 2025.
Since January 2025, the company says, its annual recurring revenue has risen 11.7 times and the number of customer conversations processed monthly has grown 32-fold. Clients include Elaraby Group, Raneen, 2B, Lucky One, Erada Finance and Simplex.
The next version
The investment comes as Tactful prepares to launch a new version of its platform designed to let enterprises build and change end-to-end customer-experience workflows themselves — cutting development cycles from months to hours while keeping human sign-off at every step.
“Enterprises across the region are actively seeking practical, reliable solutions to integrate AI into their customer operations safely and at scale. Tactful has successfully deployed this infrastructure in live production environments,” Dowidar said. “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.”
Elmasry said few leaders understood as well as Dowidar what large enterprises need before they trust new customer-facing technology. “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.”
Tactful plans to raise a Series A round in 2027.
