Hossein TooToonchy

Honoured to mentor the NSU Startups Next cohort on how founder-driven personal branding fuels startup growth. And here are my key three suggestions for them. 1. Founder credibility is the first currency. Before traction, revenue, or pitch decks, it’s the founder’s reputation that builds early trust. Investors back clarity, integrity, and consistency. 2. Personal purpose must align with business direction. Tools like Ikigai and Personal SWOT help founders understand who they are, what they stand for, and how that shapes their startup narrative. 3. Authenticity outperforms perfection. Today’s audiences and investors connect more with real stories than polished slogans. Transparent communication builds stronger relationships and long-term brand equity.

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At the Humanoids Summit, Ian Khan sits down with Modar Alaoui, Founder of the Humanoids Summit, to discuss the global rise of humanoid robotics and embodied AI. Modar shares the vision behind launching the summit, the commercialization phase of humanoid robots, and how founders, investors, and researchers can align capital with real-world deployment. The conversation explores mass production challenges, live humanoid demonstrations, and the future of embodied intelligence shaping industries worldwide. 🎥 Watch the full conversation here 👇 https://bit.ly/4bci3Og #HumanoidsSummit #HumanoidRobots #EmbodiedAI #RoboticsInnovation #TechLeadership #FutureOfRobotics #Entrepreneurship #AI #Innovation

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The past week has been a whirlwind of announcements about the Middle East making enormous investments in Tech and AI. This morning - as I was reading the news at the breakfast table in Stockholm, I saw my #LBS classmate Hassan Jameel in a photo taken during President Trump's visit to Riyadh last week, and I reflected on how fortunate I am to be part of this revolutionary part of our history. Here are 3 of the key announcements: 📌 Launch of HUMAIN: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia) introduced "Humain", a state-backed AI company under the Public Investment Fund (PIF). Humain aims to position Saudi Arabia as a global AI powerhouse and plans include developing advanced data centers and creating one of the world's most powerful multimodal Arabic large language models. 📌AI Campus in Abu Dhabi - On May 15th, plans for a new data center (the largest outside of the US) was unveiled in the presence of HH Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (President of the UAE) and President Trump. The AI Campus is part of a broader "US-UAE AI Acceleration Partnership," aimed at enhancing collaboration in artificial intelligence and advanced technologies between the two nations. 📌The UAE to invest $1.4 trillion (yes, trillion.... 💰 ) in various US-based AI/tech companies (and related technologies) over the next decade (NVIDA chips, data centers, energy plants, etc). With this, the UAE aims to establish itself as a leading global hub for AI research and innovation. I am excited about the vital role we play at Storyals in helping organizations upskill their employees, so that they can not only keep pace with this technological revolution - but actively shape it! 🤓 #digitalleadership #AIadoption #digitalskills

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This development is strong external validation for what we’ve been building with Mātr (check it out here www.zwag.ai) #Google.org backing research at MBZUAI (Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence) focused on underrepresented languages and structural robustness confirms something we identified early: scaling AI globally is not a data-volume problem alone - it is a structural interpretation problem. Models fail not because they lack tokens, but because they mis-handle linguistic divergence across typologies. #Mātr was built precisely to address that layer. Not another dataset. Not another fine-tune. But a structural interpretation infrastructure that operates at inference time, enforces linguistic conformity, and corrects meaning-level divergence without retraining base models. When major institutions begin funding “resource-lean, language-robust AI,” it signals that the market is converging toward the same bottleneck Mātr was designed to solve. That convergence matters. We are already in conversations in this space. Our work sits directly within the research trajectory now receiving institutional backing. As the ecosystem formalizes evaluation standards for multilingual robustness, structural correction layers like Mātr become not optional enhancements, but infrastructure. For investors, this is timing logic: • The problem is now publicly acknowledged. • Institutional capital is entering the category. • We already have a working framework and documented POC results. That creates a head start window. Infrastructure plays in AI do not remain independent forever. Once validation reaches hyperscaler level, acquisition cycles tend to compress. From this inflection point, a 24-month acquisition horizon is strategically realistic - provided execution continues at pace. In short: the market is moving toward the thesis Mātr was built on. And early infrastructure in emerging AI categories is where asymmetric outcomes tend to happen. Nipuna Abeykoon Thamar Solorio Carrington Malin Prashant K. (PK) Gulati Jamil Shinawi Bashar Kilani Prem Barthasarathy Arjun Sarkar Mustafa Suleyman Sundar Pichai Daniela Amodei

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Y Combinator Launches of the Week. 1) Louiza Labs: Founded by Larissa Tyagi and Georgia Witchel, Louiza Labs accurately simulates human biology so medical technology (devices, robots, etc) can be trained and tested without real patients or hard-to-access real-world medical data. Know More At: louiza.ai 2) Pingo AI: Founded by Michael Xing and Morrie Schonfeld, Pingo AI is an AI companion that helps you learn languages. Know More At: mypingoai.com 3) ContextFort: Founded by Harshvardhan Agarwal and Ashwin Ramachandran, ContextFort is automating drawing reviews for construction contractors. Know More At: contextfort.ai 4) Rid: Founded by Benedikt Stroebl and Veniamin Veselovsky, Rid sells a product through a text. Know More At: rid.me 5) Tasker AI: Founded by Ahmed A. and Hesham Ghandour, Tasker AI is an AI assistant for everyday work and life to-dos. Know More At: tasker.ai 6) IronGrid: Founded by Fern Morrison and Gabriele Pozzato, Ph.D., Iron Grid is AI Insurance for hardware. Know More At: getirongrid.com 7) Gecko Security: Founded by Jeevan Jutla and Artemiy Malyshau, Gecko Security is an AI Security Engineer to find and fix vulnerabilities. Know More At: gecko.security 8) VibeFlow (YC S25): Founded by Alessia Paccagnella and Elia Saquand, VibeFlow generates full-stack web apps from prompts with n8n-style visual workflows for the backend. Know More At: vibeflow.ai 9) Lilac: Founded by Lucas Ewing and Ryan Ewing, Lilac is an Open-Source MLOps platform ensuring your data scientists have GPUs. Know More At: getlilac.com Post: https://lnkd.in/dA_nYFFj Source: https://lnkd.in/gBBjGht8

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It’s never easy for a startup founder to pivot and deviate from the plans and ideas in their mind. GenieLabs CEO and co-founder Nadav Benoudiz has had to pivot multiple times on his startup journey. On this week’s episode of the Midstage Startup Momentum Podcast, Navad shares with startup coach Roland Siebelink when it’s time for a founder to pivot. https://lnkd.in/gQd9-xzY #StartupJourney #EntrepreneurLife #BusinessPivot #FoundersMindset #InnovationStrategy #LeadershipLessons #ResilienceInBusiness #ProductMarketFitJourney

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Catalyzed by artificial intelligence, Humanoid Robots should operate alongside humans and navigate legacy infrastructure, changing the way products are made and sold, and eventually the way we live our lives. Specialized Robots—from industrial arms to surgical and warehouse systems—should proliferate as AI collapses the cost of integration, embedding automation into every operational process across manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, and the physical world. Meanwhile, Reusable Rockets should continue to reduce the cost of launching satellite constellations, enable uninterruptible connectivity and earth observation, and open the frontier for space-based compute infrastructure unconstrained by terrestrial power and cooling limitations. A nascent innovation platform, robotics could collapse the cost of transporting across distance with hypersonic travel, the cost of manufacturing complexity with specialized systems, and the cost of physical work with AIguided humanoid robots

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