I'm Ismail AlKamal, a director at AlKamal International, a Saudi construction business as well as a part-time entrepreneur experimenting with building and growing my own businesses since 2008.
I've been extremely lucky since 2014 to bootstrap a business developing and selling enterprise software, hardware and services. You can check my core business at nawatt.com
If you are in the Middle East, you already know the difficulty in building a sustainable tech business. Even till this day, I face what is termed as VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) on a daily basis.
Nawatt was able to work on interesting projects worldwide for several universities, research centers, public agencies and companies including the European Space Agency, The Oklahoma department of Transportation, the Jabal Omar Development Company in Saudi Arabia and AlNaboodah holding group in Dubai.
Our Enterprise Asset Management system was a runner up in the 2018 best new technology category award in one of the UAE's most prominent business competitions.
Nawatt's core value is developing simple solutions for real world local problems using technology. For example, the first project we developed was a low cost custom made ultrasound medical scanner. You can see the crude design below.
Since I was a kid, I had a deep fascination of technology. This later materialized in specializing in Embedded Systems (Internet of Things) and Digital Signal Processing. I studied with great professors including Dr. Mohammed Adnan AlAlaoui at the American University of Beirut and Dr. Lina Karam at Arizona State University.
In 2010, I spent some time in Harvard and MIT and studied with Dr. Alan MacCormack in the entrepreneurship lab. A great experience that allowed me to watch up close the rise of Dropbox and Hubspot and several other startups in the bio tech industry.
Finally, I joined my family's construction business in 2012 and was able to grow the company 5X in 3 years. We're proud to be part of the success of many hotel development projects in Saudi Arabia.
I've been in charge of many projects including the furnishing of 4,000 hotel keys at Hilton Suites, Marriott, Hyatt, Conrad and Hilton Convention in Makkah as well as the renovation of 414 keys for Sheraton Makkah Jabal Al Kaaba and 1,100 rooms in Holiday Inn Makkah Abraj AlKiswa in Makkah as well as the development of the Choice hotel brand in Saudi Arabia in Jeddah and Riyadh.
In the Media:
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Highlights:
2005
2008
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2010
Research: