Former e& chief Hatem Dowidar invests in Cairo's Tactful AI

Former e& chief Hatem Dowidar invests in Cairo's Tactful AI

19 October 2026: Hatem Dowidar, who ran the telecoms group e& as Group CEO until March 2026, has invested in Tactful AI, a customer experience software company with teams in Cairo and Cambridge, UK. The money is an extension of Tactful's pre-Series A round, announced on 19 October, and the company did not disclose the terms.

Not yet independently verified. Tactful AI does not state the size of the extension, the total raised or a valuation, and its revenue and conversation growth figures are its own. The $1 million size of the February round comes from Wamda's report, not from this release. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

Tactful says the extension comes as it prepares a new generation of its product and that it plans to raise a Series A in 2027.

Who is investing

Dowidar led e& from 2020 to March 2026, having joined the group in 2015 as Group Chief Operating Officer. Before that he spent 16 years at Vodafone, including as chief executive of Vodafone Egypt. Tactful's co-founder and chief executive, Mohamed Elmasry, says few leaders share his understanding of "what large enterprises require before trusting new, customer-facing technologies".

Dowidar himself points to demand from large companies in the region. "Enterprises across the region are actively seeking practical, reliable solutions to integrate AI into their customer operations safely and at scale," he says, adding that Tactful has deployed its platform in live production environments.

The round it extends

The original pre-Series A was announced in February 2026 and co-led by Foras AI and M Empire. Wamda reported it at $1 million, with deep-tech angels and the two founders, Mohamed Elmasry and Mohamed Hassan, also taking part, and said the money would go on growth in Egypt, testing expansion into other EMEA markets, and research and development. Wamda gave 2016 as the founding year.

What Tactful sells and what it claims

Tactful's platform puts customer conversations on every channel into one workspace, with analytics, automation and AI agents that can take actions rather than only answer questions; every agent action is logged and governed. The next generation, which the company says it will describe in the coming months, is meant to let a business build and change its own customer experience in hours rather than months, with a person approving each step.

The growth figures are the company's own. It says annual recurring revenue has grown 11.7 times since January 2025, and that the number of customer conversations the platform handles each month has grown 32 times over the same period. Named customers include Elaraby Group, Raneen, 2B, Lucky One, Erada Finance and Simplex.

Where it fits

Tactful competes for the same budgets as contact centre and customer service suites, a market where buyers now ask how far an AI agent can act on its own. Our contact center software category lists 16 products, our conversational AI platform software category eight and our customer service software category five.

Company profile on TrustList: Tactful AI

Related on TrustList:

• Flyle raises ¥1.88bn Series A for its AI contact centre agents

Sources

• Tactful AI: Former e& Group CEO Hatem Dowidar invests in Tactful AI, 19 October 2026
• Wamda: Egypt's Tactful AI raises $1 million pre-Series A to scale agentic CX, 9 February 2026