About The Speaker
Mohamed Hamza
Mohamed Hamza is the associate director of the American University in Cairo’s business accelerator, the AUC Venture Lab (V-Lab). Hamza joined the Venture lab as a program Manager mid 2015. Under his management he was able to scale the Venture lab from a program graduating 12 startups a year into a Center graduating 45 to 50 startups a year and adding value to more than 400 students and entrepreneurs to be yearly. Over the years Hamza co-Founded three new programs […]
Mohamed Hamza is the associate director of the American University in Cairo’s business accelerator, the AUC Venture Lab (V-Lab). Hamza joined the Venture lab as a program Manager mid 2015. Under his management he was able to scale the Venture lab from a program graduating 12 startups a year into a Center graduating 45 to 50 startups a year and adding value to more than 400 students and entrepreneurs to be yearly. Over the years Hamza co-Founded three new programs under the V-Lab; the Fintech Accelerator, DeepTech Lab and AUC Angels.
As an Impact driven individual, Hamza’s efforts were crowned by receiving the High Impact Incubation Program award for the Middle East & North Africa by University Based Incubator Index (UBI). To date the Venture lab has graduated128 startups, maintaining quality for the first 3 years represented in maintaining a survival rate of 80% where 48% of graduates received investments.
Hamza’s endeavors at the managerial level could only be successful by maintaining a strong and impactful content, especially as the Venture lab is a non-profit accelerator that does not do seed investments in its graduate startups. V-Lab receives 800-1000 applications yearly and remain to be competitive among different programs with attractive ticket sizes for its commitment to an innovative startup centric program capitalizing on the Evidence Based Entrepreneurship mindset.
Before joining the V-Lab, Hamza worked at Nahdet el Mahrousa, one of Egypt’s top social entrepreneurship incubators. Hamza’s work with NM allowed him to be exposed to entrepreneurship at the micro level in different development programs and accumulating impact assessment knowledge through assisting in laying the the foundation for a monitoring and evaluation system to assess the overall impact of their social startup incubator.
Hamza graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and a Minor in Business Administration from the American University in Cairo and is currently pursuing his Masters degree in Public Policy and its direct effects on the entrepreneurship ecosystem.