They are already in the room where this is decided

A Lebanese woman runs a generative AI company valued at one point nine billion dollars. A Lebanese engineer runs a venture fund in partnership with MIT. Almost nobody on this record knew either of those sentences was true.

Ask what the Lebanese are doing in artificial intelligence and you will get one of two answers. Either a shrug, or a founder in Beirut struggling against the electricity.

Both answers are wrong, and the reason they are wrong is the reason this record exists.

May Habib was born in Lebanon. Her family emigrated to Canada when she was young. She read economics and Near Eastern languages at Harvard, then went into finance, Lehman Brothers and then Mubadala in Abu Dhabi.

In March 2015 she left finance and co-founded Qordoba, which used machine translation and natural language processing to help companies localise their content. It worked with more than six hundred and fifty linguists across thirty countries, for clients including Visa, Marriott and the NBA.

Then in 2020 she founded Writer, a generative artificial intelligence platform built for large enterprises.

On the twelfth of November 2024, Writer announced a two hundred million dollar Series C at a valuation of one point nine billion dollars. The round was co-led by Premji Invest, Radical Ventures and ICONIQ Growth. Adobe Ventures, IBM Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Workday Ventures and Citi Ventures all took part.

Read the investor list again. Those are not tourists. Those are the companies whose own software runs the working day of most of the corporate world, putting money into a platform run by a woman born in Lebanon.

Habib Haddad was born in Beirut in 1980. Computer and communication engineering at the American University of Beirut, then a master’s in electrical engineering at the University of Southern California.

In 2007 he built Yamli, which solved a genuinely hard language problem: letting people type Arabic using Latin characters and having the machine work out what they meant. Natural language processing for Arabic, in 2007, before that phrase meant anything to anybody. Yahoo acquired it in 2012.

From 2012 to 2016 he was founding chief executive of Wamda, the platform that did more than any other to make entrepreneurship legible across the Middle East and North Africa.

He is now president and managing director of the E14 Fund, a venture fund run in partnership with MIT, which invests in spin-offs out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

A man from Beirut decides which MIT artificial intelligence spin-offs get funded.

He was a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2009 and one of MIT Technology Review’s top innovators under thirty five in 2011. He also founded Relief Lebanon in 2006 and YallaStartup in 2009, which is the part of the biography nobody quotes.

Rayan Dabbagh finished at the Grand Lycée Franco-Libanais in Beirut, moved to the United States at seventeen with no programming experience, took a computer engineering degree at Georgia Tech and went to work as a software engineer at Amazon Web Services. He left to build Bounty, a marketplace where artificial intelligence agents rather than people find, complete and get paid for tasks. In February it raised a million dollars from Andreessen Horowitz.

He is twenty three.

This record has already published the comparison, and it has not improved.

Compare like with like, because the comparison is damning enough without cheating. Writer raised two hundred million dollars in a single round. In February 2026, HAQQ Legal AI, based in Beirut and founded in 2020, raised three million, in a round reported by Forbes Middle East and Wamda as one of the largest legal technology investments in the region that year. One round against one round, that is roughly sixty seven to one. We are not claiming three million is a national record, because nobody publishes a list that would prove it, and that absence is itself the problem.

Same people. Same capability. Same language, in several cases. The difference is not talent and it is not effort.

It is where the cap table sits.

Money sent to Lebanon arrives as maintenance. Money raised abroad arrives as ownership. Only one of those compounds, and we keep doing the one that does not.

Here is the uncomfortable part, and it is not about anybody else.

Every fact in this piece is public. Writer’s funding round was covered by Bloomberg and Forbes. Habib Haddad has a Wikipedia page. None of this is hidden.

It simply was not gathered. There is no place where a Lebanese engineer in Amman or Lagos or Sydney can look and find out that these people exist, what they run, and whether they can be reached.

Artificial intelligence is, more than almost any industry in history, a network business. Who you know determines what you see early, who will take the meeting, and which door opens on the first email rather than the fortieth. It rewards proximity more than credentials.

And the Lebanese, who are demonstrably in the rooms where it is being decided, have no network at all. A few thousand here, a few hundred there, dozens of countries, and nothing that connects them.

We are thin everywhere and dense nowhere, in the one industry where density is the whole asset.

Club Cedro is the Lebanese artificial intelligence and technology wing of this record. It sits at cedro.club.

It does the unglamorous half. A directory of who is building, a list of the companies, and a calendar of every AI and technology event actually happening in Lebanon, where each entry carries the page it was read on and the date it was last checked, so a reader can tell the difference between a calendar and a guess.

The list is deliberately short, because short is what could be opened by hand and verified. That is not modesty, it is the standard. A directory with a thousand unchecked rows is worth less than a dozen that are true.

Not money. There is no fund here and there never will be.

If you are Lebanese and you work in artificial intelligence anywhere in the world, from a frontier laboratory to a team of three in Achrafieh, be findable. Put it on the record. Name the ones you know who belong on it and are missing.

May Habib did not need a diaspora network to build a two billion dollar company. Habib Haddad did not need one to be handed a fund with MIT.

The next one might.

And the reason this is urgent rather than sentimental is simple. The industry is being carved up now, in a window that will not stay open. In twenty years the question will not be whether Lebanese people were talented enough. It will be whether we were organised enough, and that is the only part still in our hands.