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 3% of applicants, the cohort worked through an intensive program of mentorship dinners, angel investor events and site visits, with access to executives and investors from OpenAI, Meta, Airbnb, JPMorgan, Lux Capital and Mozilla Ventures. The program is built on the premise that founders from the Middle East and North Africa have the technical ability but have lacked the networks that early-stage U.S. founders take for granted. Propeller is already preparing a second cohort, a sign the first served as a successful proof of concept.
The five graduating startups are FirstFlow, of Jordan, an in-chat onboarding platform that guides users from first message to full adoption of AI agents; Flowbrave, of Morocco, which turns static business processes into dynamic, AI-guided workflows; Nexguards, of Egypt, which runs AI-powered social engineering simulations and personalized security awareness training for enterprises; OORB, of Tunisia, a robotics observability platform that captures every robot run, scores reliability and identifies what changed when behavior breaks; and Techbible, also of Morocco, which maps every software and AI tool inside a company to track spend, usage and renewals.
Throughout the residency, founders attended weekly mentorship dinners with executives from Airbnb, Meta, OpenAI, JPMorgan, Cartesia, Rho, Lux Capital, Mozilla Ventures, Plug and Play and Mentors Fund. The cohort also 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, held May 30, featured live pitches, a fireside chat with Writer Chief Technology Officer and co-founder Waseem Alshikh, and a panel on the growing role of MENA talent inside Silicon Valley’s AI companies. The panel featured Ahmed Rashad of Perle AI and Ahmad Saddedin of Y Combinator-backed Corgea.
The residency is an extension of Propeller’s broader strategy. In November 2025, the firm launched a $50 million Fund III targeting seed to pre-Series A startups in AI infrastructure and AI-native software across the U.S. and MENA. The Jordan-founded firm built the fund around a specific thesis: that MENA technical talent and U.S. market opportunity are underconnected, and that the gap can be closed with the right cross-border infrastructure.
By the time of the announcement, Propeller had already backed five U.S.-focused companies from the new fund, including developer tooling firm Codemod, networking startup Netpreme and cybersecurity companies Stealthium and Ciphero AI. The fund’s two earlier 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. Propeller now operates across Amman, Riyadh, Boston and Silicon Valley.
