Amir Dehghan

Amir Dehghan, Expansion & Strategy Lead at AstroLabs, specializes in guiding companies through their KSA expansion strategies and offering advisory services for scaling strategies. Amir has over 8 years of management consulting experience spanning diverse sectors. Prior to AstroLabs, Amir led various advisory projects for corporates and large SMEs across Europe and the Middle East, with a focus on market penetration and growth.

Imad Itani

Imad Itani is the Innovation manager for ALEC, one of the leading construction firms in the Gulf region. Imad is an experienced construction professional having background in delivering high profile projects including airports, theme parks, hotels and high-rise towers. He is known for utilizing experience, proactive project management skills and different innovation tools to transform practices in the construction industry.

Imad is highly motivated with a genuine eagerness to learn and develop thus keeping pace of new procedures, strategies, and technologies to stay abreast of developments across different fields.

Passionate about people and utilizing interpersonal skills to increase collaboration between all parties hence adding value across the whole construction ecosystem. Imad has also completed multiple certifications including PMP, EMBA from INSEAD in addition to many other certifications and trainings including innovation.

Imad has been leading the innovation drive across ALEC since early 2017; working with many staff across the organization and promoting the innovation culture. Since inception, many new initiatives were driven from simple ideas into successful projects that generates value to the organization. Continuous improvement is a prime focus and have been utilizing technologies including Data, Analytics, Technology & automation in addition to 3D printing, where it adds value, in increasing efficiency and process improvements. Imad has been featured in many articles explaining construction innovation and have also presented in multiple forums.

Hercu Viljoen

Hercu completed his schooling in South Africa in 1980 and then spent two years in the South African defense force as a commissioned officer in the Engineering Corps.

Hercu was granted a scholarship from Grinaker to study Civil Engineering at University of Pretoria and after graduation worked at Grinaker for the next 20 years. He started as a site engineer in 1987 and finished as the Managing Director of Building Inland in 2006, taking responsibility for building projects in Southern Africa as well as being involved in the formation of ALEC, a new construction company in the UAE.

Hercu joined ALEC (Dubai) in 2006 as a Project Director. In 2008 he also became responsible for the Abu Dhabi projects. In 2010 he was involved with expanding ALEC into Qatar and Oman, established offices there and secured the first projects in those regions.

In 2012 ALEC restructured the business and Hercu became the Managing Director responsible to diversify the ALEC income stream through a portfolio of related businesses. Hercu directed the Related Businesses as his main responsibility and assisted the greater business with vision, future planning, innovation, integrity, and alignment.

In 2020 Hercu retired from the main ALEC business to join and establish APIO, a joint venture business between ALEC and CNM in the UK. He is currently officially retired and involved with a few start-up businesses as angel investor and advisor.

Mauricio Weiss

GP and Founding Partner of Zacua Ventures, a global fund focused on early stage startups in the construction industry. Mauricio works closely with entrepreneurs to help them succeed, achieve high ESG standards and drive the industry forward to respond to the main climate and productivity challenges. His background working in the job-site first and at Cemex Ventures later taught him what is needed for a successful implementation of technology and the right approach for startups engaging large corporates.

Michael Maylahn

Michael is an entrepreneur and investor. He spent a decade building a healthtech company leveraging algorithms to help clinical teams predict problems in their hospital patients. He’s now supporting other founders as an investor with Plug and Play, leveraging his learnings to accelerate the journey of others.

Sameer Sortur

Sameer Sortur is the Founder & CEO at SquareCircle Global with specialities in Early Stage Venture Creation and Venture Deals, Investments, Corporate Innovation, AI & Frontier Technology Development, Market Entry & Tech/IP Commercialization for Early & Growth stage companies. At SquareCircle Global, he has enabled market entry and growth engineering for B2B and B2G focussed tech companies in the Sustainability & Circular Economy, Fintech, Healthtech to launch across Middle East Africa, Asia Pacific and the US. Sameer is actively involved in the early stage startup ecosystem as a Regional Director GCC for Founder Institute, the world’s largest pre-seed startup accelerator and recently as a Co-Director with Startup Grind Dubai, Startup Grind is the world’s largest community of startups, founders, innovators, and creators conducting 2000+ events across 600+ cities, 125+ countries, 1700+ Chapter team members and 5M+ Community members worldwide.

Sarah Grippay

6+ years of experience in creative problem solving, prototyping and digital strategy in UAE, KSA and Europe. Graduated with Distinction with a BSc in International Business from the University of Kent, focusing on international strategy, European Business and International Entrepreneurship, along with a Year in Industry in Paris.

Toufic Osseiran

VC | Investor | Advisor | Mentor