Founder · Technologist · Author
Building across game entertainment, social impact, and early-stage tech.
14+ years in engineering and product, now founding and advising ventures that span narrative games, nonprofit health tech, and startups navigating fundraising and product-market fit. Based in Sharjah, UAE — working with teams globally.
About
A builder's path, one venture at a time.
I started as a full-stack and front-end engineer, working across the UK, Netherlands, Pakistan, and Belgium — shipping ERP transformations, energy analytics platforms, and AI-driven waste management systems. That engineering foundation is still how I approach every venture: start with the system, then the story.
Since then I've founded and led companies across very different domains — an IoT air purifier startup, a construction-tech company, a travel platform, a nonprofit blood-donor app, and now an independent AAA game studio. Along the way I've written eleven books on entrepreneurship, AI governance, and faith, and been recognized by Hacker Noon, GitHub's Arctic Code Vault, and several regional startup awards.
What ties it together isn't the industry — it's the pattern of taking an idea from zero to a real product, a real team, and real users. That's also what I most enjoy helping other founders do.
Education & Certifications
Formal education, and every certificate that mattered.
Education
Certifications & Programs
Ventures
What I'm building now — and what came before.
Jinn Studios
Founder & Creative Director
An independent narrative game studio building The Jinn — a AAA title for PS5, Xbox, and PC rooted in Islamic lore and Sufi mythology, expanding into a novel, soundtracks, and future transmedia formats.
Jinn Systems
Founder
Intelligent hardware and developer tools — Jinn Code, an AI coding extension on the VS Code Marketplace, and an intelligent evaporative cooler built on a dual-STM32/ESP32 embedded AI stack.
GeoBlood
Founder & Executive Director
A US-registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit behind a free blood-donor finder app — real-time GPS matching, encrypted messaging, and emergency alerts. Backed by Apple, Microsoft, and Google for Nonprofits. Directed remotely from the UAE, volunteer-led.
Earlier ventures
BreatheIO
IoT air purifier startup — pre-seed raised, Top 50 recognition at the World Festival Innovation Awards.
breatheio.com →TripOTap
Dubai-based travel platform I led as CEO through a $4M valuation milestone.
tripotap.com →ApnaHouse
Co-founded and served as CTO for this Pakistan-based construction-tech company.
LinkedIn →Wattie
Energy analytics company where I was Front End Architect (Netherlands) and later CTO (Pakistan).
Side Projects
Hardware and hobby builds on the side.
Smaller IoT and hardware experiments outside the main ventures — built for the love of shipping something tangible.
Air Sentinel
AI Air Quality Monitoring
LoRaWAN-connected sensors for smart cities and communities — real-time detection of pollution, smoke, and gas anomalies with instant alerts and remote dashboards.
RampGuard
Airport Ramp Worker Safety
A wearable safety system for airport ramp crews — AI monitoring for heat stress, ergonomic risk, and fatigue, with an alert-to-rest-order cascade in under 90 seconds. Intelak Incubator 2026 Cohort 9 applicant.
MechaBots
Robotics STEM Education
A 17-degree-of-freedom humanoid robot kit for hands-on STEM learning — build, code, and animate in Scratch or Python, with competition-ready curriculum.
Dead Man Safe
Digital Legacy Protection
A digital asset protection service — securing online accounts, personal data, and digital assets, with a plan for their safe transfer after death.
Advisory
Advising founders on the things I've had to figure out myself.
Open to advising early-stage founders and teams in three areas, drawn directly from building and funding multiple companies across very different markets.
Tech Strategy
Architecture decisions, build-vs-buy calls, and choosing the right stack and team structure for where your company actually is — not where a template assumes you are.
Fundraising
Positioning, pitch narrative, and valuation conversations — from pre-seed through growth rounds, across both venture and nonprofit funding paths.
Product-Market Fit
Cutting scope to what actually proves the hypothesis, reading early user signal honestly, and knowing when to pivot versus push through.
Books
Eleven books, written alongside eleven years of building.
Make Me a Programmer
The Independent Entrepreneur (2021)
IoTpreneurship
The Future of Inventing Internet of Things (2021)
VC Decoded
The Startup's Guide to Funding & Valuation (2025)
The AI Codex
Governance, Ethics & the Future of Intelligent Systems (2025)
The Jinn: The Awakening
Literary foundation of the Jinn Studios IP (2025)
CodeBreaker 2038
Quantum, Chaos & the Collapse of Digital Defenses (2025)
A Cup of Tea with God
Conversations on Faith, Fear & the Psychology of Trust (2025)
The Utopian University
What if universities were free? — a tuition-free, AI-driven model
The Executor
Leadership, Power, and the Art of Governing Pakistan
Pakistan Unleashed
The Blueprint for the World's Next Great Economy (2026)
The Unseen Investor
What Allah Taught Me About Building in the Dark (2026)
Awards & Recognition
Recognized along the way.
Press & Media
Coverage across startups, tech, and gaming.
A selection of press, interviews, and official coverage across ventures — from Jinn Studios and GeoBlood to earlier startups like BreatheIO and TripOTap.