Hawa Dawa is an environment intelligence company – Originally founded to help asthma patients

The idea of the wearable device was to crowdsource the data. All people using the device would contribute data on air quality.
Karim Tarraf CEO and Co-Founder Hawa Dawa

Audience Note on Recording Quality

In the beginning, we had some problems with the audio and video quality of the interview. Please stick with us it gets much better during the interview. We are sorry about that, but our influence on internet bandwidth is very limited.

The Founder

In this interview, we talk to Karim Tarraf (https://www.linkedin.com/in/karim-hesham-tarraf-a0773250/), the CEO and Co-Founder of Munich-based Hawa Dawa (https://hawadawa.com/, https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/hawa-dawa-munich-germany, https://twitter.com/hawadawalabs).  He was originally born in Kairo to an Egyptian-German family. He graduated from the Technical University of Munich (TU Munich or TUM) and started to work on projects and government entities on topics of climate change and development assistance (for countries). In those capacities, he worked for projects with the UN Environment Program.

Karim personally witnessed the Arab Spring in Egypt, which left an impression on him.

He later got back to TU Munich for a master's degree, were the first ideas of Hawa Dawa emerged. TU Munich also has a large startup and entrepreneurship program. You can learn more about the program called UnternehmerTUM here.

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The Startup

Within a seminar at his master courses, Karim participated in a two-week hackathon. Next to him, there was an Indian student, who talked about the air pollution in India. So they developed a wearable device for asthma patients, to measure air quality. Asthma patients should – due to their health condition – avoid polluted air and the device could help them do this.

The idea to gather the data did now work well, so they started developing their own stations to measure air quality. This made them to an environment intelligence company.

The founders discovered similarities in several languages where Hawa means air and Dawa means medicine, so they combined both. The startup creates the data and places them on data markets. Measuring air quality is not as simple, as it first sounds. During the interview, we talk about technical details and it turns out that they even use AI to calibrate their sensors.

Venture Capital Funding

Hawa Dawa is looking for a funding round for internationalization in 2021. We will connect you if you are interested.

The Video Interview went live on August 6th, 2020, 19.00 Frankfurt local time (CET) / 1 PM Eastern

https://youtu.be/kDJhVI6kAO0

The Audio Interview is set to go live on August 11th during the night - German local time

The Audio Podcast will be published next week. Subscribe to our podcasts here

Further Readings / Additional Resources

In this interview, we included all further reading links in the show notes.

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The Host

This interview was conducted by Jörn “Joe” Menninger, startup scout, founder and host of Startuprad.io. Reach out to him:
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