Cairo’s Nerds Scrape Together an Egyptian Tech Scene

At a shared workspace in central Cairo, a 15-minute drive from the Nile, Mohammed Abuelhagag is working on a stem cell incubator. The bottom half, housing the motors, is made of laser-blackened wood. The top, where the stem cells will be grown, isn’t done yet. Sensors to track humidity, temperature, and air quality have yet to clear customs. “Here in Egypt, if you want to make something, it’s like a treasure hunt,” says Abuelhagag, 29.

He’s a regular at Fab Lab Egypt, a home for aspiring developers that’s become an early building block of the country’s tiny but growing tech scene. In the five years since the so-called Twitter revolution drove President Hosni Mubarak from power, startups, incubators, and angel investors have sprung up like shoots of grass after a drought. “The revolution showed me what people can achieve when they work together,” says Hisham Khodeir, a software engineer who helped found Fab Lab in 2012.