01
Founder in progress — Damascus, Syria
I'm Ahmad Barakat, founder at Atmatatech. Right now that means building Masar — transit infrastructure for a city that's never had one — and Wasla, a 350+ member community connecting Syria's youth to the events that matter.
02 — About
I was born in Qamishli, in Syria's northeast — my family's roots trace back further to Mardin, just across the border in Turkey. Displacement took me to Turkey for several years before I came back to study Business Administration in Damascus, three years behind where I'd otherwise be.
In between, I've been a content writer, a marketing manager for an Arabic SaaS community, and a street marketer for a ride-hailing startup in Damascus. I've tried to launch two SaaS products that didn't make it, and built two client projects with AI-assisted ("vibe") coding that never quite shipped. I've stood on stages at Startup Weekend and Tech Harvest more times than I can count.
None of that was wasted. It's the reason Atmatatech exists — and why everything I build now starts from a real, validated problem instead of an idea I fell in love with too early.
03 — Ventures
Transit infrastructure for a city that's never had one.
Damascus's سرفيس network — informal shared taxis — moves millions of people every day, and none of it exists on a digital map. Masar is building open routing infrastructure for the city using OpenTripPlanner and GTFS, the same open transit-data standard behind transit layers on maps worldwide — mapped street by street, route by route.
Every event Syria's young builders need to know about, in one place.
Syria's startup and entrepreneurship scene is scattered across dozens of group chats and pages. Wasla organizes it into one structured WhatsApp ecosystem — an archive channel, an open discussion community, and temporary groups for each event — so no one misses the room where things happen.
Turn a photo of a business card into a saved contact.
An AI tool that reads business cards and event materials from a photo and turns them into clean, structured contact data — built on Claude's vision API.
04 — Background
Currently researching AI-driven marketing personalization in Arab e-commerce for my graduation thesis — a mixed-methods study built on validated scales including IUIPC and McKnight's trust dimensions.
05 — Contact
Building something in Syria or the region? I'm always glad to compare notes.