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BREAKING NEW GROUND May Habib’s start-up is simplifying technology so global companies can communicate in multiple languages on different platforms BY TRISKA HAMID
ay Habib is chasing a unicorn – not the mythical creature but the billion-dollar successes of Silicon Valley. The 30-year-old co-founder and chief executive of Qordoba is now in San Francisco to cement the company’s global status and in doing so, could nurture the first unicorn to have been born out of the Middle East. Harvard-educated Habib founded Qordoba in 2011 in Dubai, providing software to companies to enable them to automate content publishing in multiple languages and channels. Born in Lebanon, she began her career in New York, working as a software analyst in mergers and acquisitions for a global investment bank. “There was an aspect to international living and causes that was completely missing from my day to day life,” she says. “Even though I found the work enjoyable and the company fascinating, I was not thinking outside a very narrow domain.” An opportunity to work for Mubadala, the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi, popped up for Habib who “jumped at it” and began a two year stint with Mubadala that led to travel across Singapore, London, Germany, the USA and UAE. “I definitely hit my stride,” she says. “We were doing deals all over the world, with a small diverse team. It could not be
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more different than my experience in Wall Street.” It was during that time that Habib was able to observe the differences between the developed and emerging markets. Both were moving online, but at varying speeds. Mobile adoption and mobile internet penetration has experienced exponential growth in emerging markets but one of the main issues is the lack of content online. “The problem of online content was one I kept coming back to the most,” says Habib. “A lot of the motivation when we first started Qordoba was around the idea of information poverty. We’re enabling global access to products and services. There’s a massive push for universal Internet access by 2020 – but if there aren’t good products in those languages, we won’t get the development surplus we think we will by that kind of access,” says Habib. It is thought that Arabic constitutes less than two per cent of all online content, a disparate figure considering native Arabic speakers constitute almost five per cent of the world’s population. For a global company, translating and creating websites for each market they operate in can be an expensive endeavour, so Habib—along with her co-founder and current chief technology