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MIT Arab Business Plan Awards Declared

DUBAI — Two fledgling companies, one involved in patient financing, and another, a service provider that can rank non-spam emails according to their importance, competed with more than 1,200 companies from 17 countries spanning North Africa, the Gulf and Levant, and emerged as first place winners to split the $50,000 prize money in the 2009 MIT Arab Business Plan 
Competition.

UAE’s Hayati Health Care, led by co-founder and chief executive officer Dr. Michael Matly, and partners Dr. Tarig El-Titi and David Matly, shared the prize with Saudi Arabia’s Syphir — a five-man team led by spokesperson Ghassan Fayad and co-creators Husain Al-Mohssen, Courtland Allen, Faisal Alibrahim, and Abdulrahman 
Tarabzouni.

In second place with a $10,000 prize, was Egypt’s Rice Straw Fertilizer Company with team members Ibrahim Khater Youssef, Ahmed El Dorghamy, and Mohamed Abdel Raouf. Third place honors with a $5,000 prize went to Jordan’s Blog Souq composed of Ahmad Takatkah, Adey Salamin and Ammar Ibrahim.

A special award was given to another UAE team, Vaxeal Therapuetics, a therapeutic vaccine research company formed by Dr. Ahmed Bouzdi, Dr. Bernard Maillere, Giampietro Corradin and Wassim Chehadeh.

“This year’s competition turned out an amazing quality of participants, we had a very good quality of people and teams with very unique business plans,” said Ziad Younes, vice-chairman of the MIT Enterprise Forum for the Pan Arab Region in Lebanon. The MIT Arab Business Plan Competition is the equivalent of the MIT business plan competition in Cambridge which was initiated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Alumni Association. The non-profit and volunteer-driven organisation builds connections to technology entrepreneurs and to communities in which they reside, as well as produces a series of educational programmes about entrepreneurship through its network of 24 worldwide chapters.

“The quality of the participants’ business plans reflect that they understand what the competition is trying to achieve - that is so have a new crop of entrepreneurs that takes into consideration sensitivities and specifities of the Arab region,” said Younes.

Hayati Healthcare is the first ever niche ‘‘patient financing” company in the Middle East.

It markets and sells patient financing loans either through Healthcare providers to their patients, or directly 
to patients.

Michael Matly, a Lebanese-American who holds an MBA degree at Harvard and an MD degree at at Mayo Medical School, innovated on the widely-used US model by including medical procedures such as dentistry and orthodontics, fertility treatments, LASIK and ocular plastics, knee replacements and other procedures that are not covered by conventional medical insurance and which, require large out-of-pocket cash payments by patients. “I was working in Dubai with my partner, Dr. El-Titi at the Dubai executive council, and we started seeing that the quality of healthcare in UAE is improving, but because of that, it was becoming more expensive, so we realised there was a funding gap. Patients wanted to have medical procedures that are not covered by insurance, or they did not have money to do it. We thought of creating a financing company, this is already being done in the US. We have a partner bank that is underwriting loans, our company is the intermediary between the bank and patients. We want a health care program that is more affordable and accessible to people,” said Matly.

Syphir co-creator Ghassan Fayad, who is finishing his Phd in mechanical engineering at MIT this year said the team has already come up with three prototypes of systems that would rank email based on their importance.

· rocel@khaleejtimes.com