Bullets, bombs and jungles — Agemo’s founders are built different

Before cofounding Agemo, Osman Ramadan honed his skills as a machine learning scientist at at a Deepmind spin-out and then at Microsoft, after studying Computer Engineering and Neuroscience at Cambridge. But when he was first introduced to coding as a kid in his rural Sudanese village he didn’t have access to a computer, let alone the internet.

Instead, he learned his first programming language from a book that his brother — who’d moved to the UK to study — gave him on a visit back to the village in 2005. At the same time, sectarian violence was breaking out in his district, just one chapter in Sudan’s conflict-ridden history that has seen Ramadan get injured by gunfire, his family home get bombed, and his father get politically persecuted and arrested.

But, through all the bombs and bullets, he kept learning to code.

“The next time my brother visited us a couple of years later, he saw that I was so passionate, so he got me a computer, and I was the first person in the village to have one,” Ramadan remembers.

Back then, he still didn’t have regular access to the internet, so practiced by coding his own projects. These included a match-making game that he invited his friends to use on his computer (“There was this girl I really liked, so I hard-coded it so my name always came up for her,” he chuckles), and later a DIY virus to disrupt the operations of some men who had set up the village’s first IT shop, and were extorting people.

“They were not nice guys, they were taking people’s money,” says Ramadan.

He’s now teamed up with cofounder Aymeric Zhuo, whose story begins in an immigrant household in the French-governed, South American region of French Guiana, where around a third of the population are illiterate (compared to the global rate of 14%). His family, who were a persecuted Chinese minority group, fled to French Guiana in the 1970s — and Aymeric spent his youth working in their local shop.

None of this stopped Aymeric from being ranked among the top 10 students in the country and then going to to study Engineering and Applied Mathematics at École Polytechnique in Paris. He was then a founding member of Activision’s Call of Duty Mobile business, growing it from $0 to $400m in revenue in four years, a Product Lead at TikTok. Oh, and in his spare time he is a long-distance runner with a marathon personal best of 2h48 in Vienna.

Today, with AI software automation startup Agemo, Ramadan and Zhuo are competing in one of the hottest emerging space, building an AI powered workflow automation platform that allows non-technical people to build from a simple chat (think Lovable meets n8n). This allows marketers, solopreneurs and sales executive to streamline repetitive and tedious tasks and gets feedback over the last two weeks since launch like "life changing" and "beyond incredible".

They raised from Fly Ventures and firstminute capital (which together previously backed Wayve, which just raised $1bn from Softbank) as well as angels such as the founders of Zapier, Wayve, Datadog and Swiftkey and operators from Deepmind, PolyAI, Meta, Retool, Vercel and Stripe.

But if there is one thing that their backgrounds have taught them, it’s how to be scrappy — and succeed — in tough and competitive environments.

Betting on the outsider

Tech is no stranger to some of the biggest winners coming from outsider or immigrant backgrounds — the likes of Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, and Pierre Omidyar have all grown huge businesses outside of their home countries. 

But when you add in the childhood experience of living in an active conflict zone, or coming up through the broken education system of a developing economy, your entrepreneurial DNA is injected with a different level of grit. 

“I think traits that we definitely share are resourcefulness and resilience — growing up in an unstable environment and having to just fend for yourself, these traits are imbued in you,” says Zhuo.

Ramadan adds that learning how computers work without the internet and the ability to just look up an answer taught him code by problem solving from first principles.

“There was no, ‘Can I Google this?’ The only way was to look at the script, run it, maybe destroy some stuff, and reboot again,” he says.

Bombs and bullets

And it wasn’t just the lack of internet to contend with. In the same year that Ramadan got given his first book on coding, the violence of the second Sudanese civil war, which had been raging since 1983, arrived in his village, with the lighter skinned ethnic groups that he and his family belonged to getting targeted.

“Everything was fine and then suddenly it's a civil war with people killing each other on the street,” he says. 

Ramadan managed to stay safe and graduate from high school as the third top student in the country and his father, who had previously been arrested for expressing his political views in a national newspaper, was trying to persuade him to take up an offer at Cambridge.

He wanted to stay in Sudan and attend Khartoum University but, while attending a student demonstration in 2012, the reality of living in an unstable country hit home again.

“The security forces shot at the protestors and the bullet didn't hit me, but hit a rock, and the rock exploded, and that hit me, and I got injured. That was when reality struck, and I decided to take the place at Cambridge,” says Ramadan.

And while he’s now been in the UK for over a decade, many of his loved ones stayed in Sudan where violence continues to this day. In 2023, his family home in the village was hit by a shell from an airstrike: “My mum and my sister were in the house, but luckily in a different room and weren’t hurt. It was scary, and we were also fundraising for Agemo at the time,”

“The fabric of hard work”

“I think one of the things it gives you is a relentlessness — you don’t take things for granted,” Ramadan says. “We also always know: we’ve managed to get from there to here, so what can prevent us from achieving the next thing? We’re going to keep trying and we’re going to keep doing it. And I think this is the biggest value.”

Ramadan’s cofounder Zhuo might not have grown up with bullets flying over his head, but that doesn’t mean the odds weren’t stacked against him.

“Growing up was not always fun. For Osman it was a state of conflict, for me it was things around bullying tied to racism,” he says.

Zhuo’s parents fled their home of China in the 70s to escape Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution, arriving in French Guiana — a developing economy largely covered in jungle where they didn’t speak the local language.

“They were working class people, working in grocery shops and restaurants and never had any education or degree, and then they managed to open a business together in the early 90s,” he says.

“We saw my parents working extremely hard, seven days a week, 12 hour days. It was really a blue collar job that involved a lot of sweat equity. Growing up in that environment just teaches you the fabric of hard work.”

A different type of motivation

Coming from these kinds of disadvantaged places doesn’t only hard-code resilience and resolve into a founder, it also gives you a different type of motivation to succeed. 

Zhuo and Ramadan aren’t just building Agemo to build a world-leading product — they also want to show the next wave of entrepreneurs back home that you can build a significant business wherever you’re from

“I want to inspire future generations, so that we're not the last to come out of these places and do impactful companies,” says Zhuo, adding that success for Agemo would also allow him to help affect structural change back home. “What French Guiana is lacking is a sense of direction and leadership. The impact that I eventually want to have is to invest into education.”

Ramadan also wants to be able to make a difference in Sudan, and says that there are links between what Agemo is doing — by allowing people to build software tools with less resources — and how AI could help developing countries to establish much-needed digital infrastructure.

“These developing countries aren’t going to have that much capital available. So it’s about how you can get a lot of impact with little capital,” he says.

And that is exactly what Ramadan and Zhuo are focussed on building at Agemo — a system that lets individuals and organisations build the tools they need at a lower cost. They describe it as a next-generation, AI chat-powered version of Zapier — which, after receiving just $1.3m in funding, hit a $5bn valuation for its no code, drag and drop software automation tool.

With Zapier cofounder Mike Knoop on board as an angel investor in Agemo, the startup is already convincing people who know this market that it has what it takes to redefine software automation in the AI age. And given the starting points Ramadan and Zhuo have come from to get here, there doesn’t seem much chance of them letting up in the race.