Egyptian agentic AI customer experience (CX) startup Tactful AI has secured investment from Hatem Dowidar, the former group CEO of e&, as part of an extension of its pre-Series A funding round.
Founded by Mohamed Elmasry, Mohammad Hassan and Sherif Khairallah, Tactful is a unified customer experience platform that provides businesses with a single dashboard through which to manage, engage, augment, and understand customers’ journeys across various touch points.
In 2022, the company was acquired by Dstny, a leading European company that offers a series of interactive communication tools that brings employees and customers closer together, but it was reacquired by its founders in July 2025.
Disrupt Africa reported in February Tactful AI had raised US$1 million in a pre-Series A funding round co-led by Foras AI and M Empire, and it has now extended that round with the investment from Dowidar, the size of which is undisclosed.
Dowidar has spent more than 25 years in telecoms and technology. He led e& as group CEO from 2020 until March 2026, after joining the company as chief operating officer in 2015. Before e&, he spent 16 years in executive roles at Vodafone, including as CEO of Vodafone Egypt.
The extra funding is a boost for Tactful AI at a time when it is about to launch a next-generation version of its technology, which aims to let enterprises build, modify and evolve end-to-end CX workflows in-house, cutting development cycles from months to hours while keeping human sign-off at every step.
The startup has been growing fast. Since January 2025, its annual recurring revenue (ARR) has risen 11.7 times, and the number of monthly customer conversations processed through its platform has increased 32-fold. Its clients include Elaraby Group, Raneen, 2B, Lucky One, Erada Finance and Simplex.
“Enterprises across the region are actively seeking practical, reliable solutions to integrate AI into their customer operations safely and at scale. Tactful has successfully deployed this infrastructure in live production environments,” Dowidar said. “Seeing the capabilities of their next-generation technology convinced me that this team has everything it takes to set the industry benchmark, both regionally and globally.”
Elmasry said few leaders understood as well as Dowidar what large enterprises need before they trust new customer-facing technologies.
“His support and trust come at a pivotal moment as we take our boldest step yet toward defining a new era of agentic AI-driven customer experience,” he said.
Tactful AI plans to raise a Series A round in 2027.
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