Mahmoud Alwadia

Mahmoud Alwadia is a software engineer from Gaza, Palestine. He had studied two years of computer science at a local university in Gaza, but then decided to drop out, and forge his own way. He moved to Germany in 2020, where he landed his first job in Munich with FINN Auto, and he later joined Shopify. The 27-year-old had secured a place in the prestigious Antler entrepreneurship accelerator program, and his edtech startup was just about to launch, when he, while on a visit to Gaza, got stuck in the city, as war broke out in October 2023.