Magdi Moussa

The short version

Magdi Moussa — Mgz to almost everyone who has met him — is the Co-Founder and CEO of People of Data, Egypt’s AI and data community. He started working at eighteen and has been building ever since: ecommerce first, then marketing, then education, then fintech, and now artificial intelligence and storytelling. Each move was less a career change than the same instinct pointed somewhere new — find the thing people say is impossible in this market, and prove it isn’t.

In 2023 he co-founded People of Data with Youssef Kamal around a deliberately unreasonable number: enable ten million Arab young people to use AI to build better work for themselves. What began as a room of practitioners in Cairo has become forty-plus meetups, a school programme running across three universities and multiple high schools, a national generative-AI filmmaking programme, and a community that companies, campuses and ministries now come to first.

From an ecommerce desk to a national programme

The through-line in Magdi’s career is distribution — understanding how something small reaches a lot of people without losing what made it good. He spent his early years in ecommerce and then in marketing, where the discipline is unforgiving: either the thing you made travels or it does not, and no amount of intent changes the number. That habit — treat every idea as something that has to survive contact with an audience — is what shaped everything after it.

In 2018 he founded immrsv Creative Group, an AI and creative studio that has since delivered more than a hundred projects across fourteen countries, with a client list that runs from the World Bank and UNDP to Meta, Udacity and Intel, and a deep bench of work in financial services. The studio is where he learned the second half of the job: not just what to say, but how to build the production system that lets a small team say it at scale.

Fintech came next. He is a co-founder of Dnaneer Financing Company, a licensed Saudi financing business — a very different discipline from creative work, and one that taught him the weight of regulated, high-consequence product decisions. It is a useful contrast to hold alongside a community organisation: one world moves at the speed of a room, the other at the speed of a regulator, and Magdi has had to be fluent in both at once.

Why People of Data exists

Egypt’s National AI Strategy sets a destination — thirty thousand AI professionals, two hundred and fifty AI companies, a meaningful share of GDP from ICT by 2030. Magdi’s argument, repeated in most rooms he speaks in, is that strategy documents do not produce engineers. Classrooms, meetups and shipped projects do, and somebody has to run them at volume, for free, in public, for years, before the numbers move.

So People of Data was built as a machine for that: two meetups a month as the engine, an upskilling arm in Skilllz that takes the same material into schools, universities and companies, and an innovation arm that puts students and practitioners in front of real corporate problems. Magdi runs the strategy, the growth and the partnerships side of it — the part that has to convince a university, a ministry or a multinational that a community organisation is a serious counterpart.

Recognition, and what he does with it

Magdi was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2023. He treats it the way he treats most things that arrive with a logo attached — as leverage rather than an outcome. The list opened doors to the executives, investors and institutions who now sit on People of Data’s advisory board and in the rooms it convenes, including the monthly Data & AI Leaders Meetups, an invite-only circle of 280 technology leaders representing data ecosystems that serve more than fifty million Egyptians.

The most recent expression of that is Egypt Eternal Voices, a national generative-AI storytelling programme built with Dr. Zahi Hawass, training a thousand creators to tell Egypt’s own history with the tools of the future. It is, in his framing, the same bet he has been making since he was eighteen: give people the means of production and get out of the way.