British Iranian, with lived experience of displacement and rebuilding.
My first business was Kameltarin, started in Iran in 2006 when I was eleven or twelve, building websites for businesses getting online for the first time. Hosting those sites ourselves was the natural next step, and that's how Fazayeto was born. I didn't know I was building a career, just that I liked making things and nobody was stopping me.
My family emigrated in 2009. A few years later, in Kuala Lumpur, I founded Pack Productions, a hybrid creative agency serving SMEs, indie events, and national festivals. That ran until 2015, followed by a few years freelancing across the UK film industry. In 2019 I co-founded Set Yeti, a marketplace for filmmakers with AI-powered visual search. COVID ended that.
Two years as a product manager at QubyteCode taught me how to ship. I prototyped a natural-speech interface for LLMs in 2022, before ChatGPT had voice. I've been building with generative AI ever since, four years in now and still learning daily.
I'm neurodivergent and self-taught with a deep technical foundation. I've rebuilt from zero more than once, through displacement and through the kind of starting point where you make the best of what you've got. None of that goes on a job description, but it's why I work the way I do: architecturally, inclined toward things that ship, with a hard preference for getting work into people's hands over getting it into a deck.
Having worked across 3 countries and 3 languages, I'm comfortable bridging gaps that monocultural teams sometimes can't see. That's the same instinct I bring to the refugee founders I support at TERN: listening past the surface, finding the right reference for the person in front of me, and building tools they can actually use.
Today I'm UK-based, running Papi Labs as a tribute to my grandfather, advising mission-led organisations, and teaching the practical AI skills the tech industry usually keeps to itself. Papi was a Lur from Borojerd, in western Iran. An electrician by trade. He cycled everywhere, helped everyone he met, friends and strangers alike, and built a life on quiet generosity. The studio is named after him because the aim is the same as his was, just at a different scale: build things that help as many people as possible, without asking for anything cruel in return.