From a workshop in Fowa to a clinic in Cairo.

Mahmoud grew up in Fowa, a small town in Kafr ash Shaykh in the Egyptian Delta. At 14, he was already taking apart computers and putting them back together for neighbours and small businesses. The workshop was where he learned that systems are made of people as much as parts.

By his late teens he had built Fowa Academy, an e-learning platform serving students who could not afford private lessons, and Fowa Store, an e-commerce business that let local sellers reach beyond their town. Neither was a side project. Both were responses to gaps he could see, run by someone who preferred to ship.

What that workshop taught him stayed: pay attention to the people using the thing, not the thing itself. Build for the room you're standing in.

In 2021, Mahmoud became the first Egyptian to place 6th in the world at the Microsoft Office Specialist World Championship — a global competition with hundreds of thousands of contestants. He was 20.

He could have stayed in tech. Instead he chose medicine. The reasoning was straightforward: the problems he wanted to work on lived inside hospitals, and he wanted to understand them from the inside, not from a deck.

His first clinic answered the question for him. A senior physician spent minutes searching for a patient's medical history that should have taken seconds. Charts were paper, half were missing, the rest were scattered across labs, pharmacies, and other clinics the patient had visited. The doctor asked the patient questions the chart should have answered. The patient answered them imperfectly, the way patients always do.

Mahmoud sat with that. The problem wasn't the doctor. The problem wasn't the patient. The problem was that nobody had built the alternative.

DIME is the answer to that clinic. It is the connective layer Egyptian healthcare has been missing — a platform that turns fragmented, scattered records into a structured source of truth that doctors and patients can both rely on.

It has to exist because the cost of not building it is paid one consultation at a time, by every patient who has to retell their history and every doctor who has to guess at it. It has to exist now because the institutions and infrastructure are finally ready to absorb it.

Mahmoud is building it because he has been in the room. He understands the doctor's workflow, the patient's anxiety, and the institutional incentives well enough to design around all three. The work is just beginning.