From Cairo to Silicon Valley: How Saif Elhager And Ahmed ElShireef Built Outrove

The hiring process has only become more impersonal and exhausting over time. Recruiters spend hours screening candidates who never feel truly seen, while applicants talk to automated systems that feel anything but human.

That disconnect is what two founders from Egypt, Saif Elhager and Ahmed ElShireef, set out to fix. Both had built early startups that required hiring offshore teams and experienced firsthand how fragmented, repetitive, and disengaging the process could be.

Their company, Outrove, builds an AI recruiter that combines global candidate discovery with a digital interviewer capable of holding lifelike conversations. It listens and interacts as a person would, delivering automated responses that feel authentic. In doing so, the pair has turned a deeply human problem into a distinctly modern solution.

The Makers Behind the Mission

Before launching Outrove, Saif Elhager and Ahmed ElShireef had already built companies of their own, both of which were leveraging AI.

Elhager had run a startup that automated advertising for e-commerce sellers, scaling it to nearly forty employees and seven-figure revenue. At the same time, ElShireef was leading a speech-therapy app powered by AI, managing a team of about twenty.

Both were hiring across regions like Egypt, India, and Pakistan, and both found the process slow, inconsistent, and draining.

They'd realized that recruiting offshore workers required endless screening, inconsistent results, and slow feedback loops. In response, both founders began automating parts of their own hiring processes, using internal scripts to filter CVs and coordinate interviews. Those stopgap tools soon evolved into something larger.

When Elhager noticed that their solutions addressed a global issue, he proposed building a company around that challenge.

Their partnership was a natural balance: Elhager's instinct for sales and fundraising met ElShireef's engineering depth. They shared a belief that the advancements in technology that stick are the ones that emerge from personal pain points, and that a product capable of fixing their own problem could scale to fix everyone else's.

Outrove: Redefining How People Hire Through AI

In January 2025, Elhager flew to San Francisco and saw firsthand how peers his age were building venture-backed companies that shaped entire industries. Within weeks, he convinced ElShireef to join him.

By March, they had released Outrove, an automated recruiter that takes care of the entire hiring funnel. The system searches across the web to identify relevant candidate profiles, sends a custom outreach message, and conducts live video interviews through a digital interviewer that looks and sounds human.

Once a candidate agrees to an interview, they meet an on-screen, fully automated interviewer who listens, responds, and grades them in real-time. The process is meant to feel authentic and conversational, closer to a discussion with a person than an interaction with software. But behind that is a complex orchestration of voice synthesis, natural language understanding, and real-time video rendering simulating the other side of the conversation.

Outrove's founders believe this realism is what bridges the trust gap between automation and experience. A human recruiter can only handle so many interviews a day, whereas Outrove could manage thousands simultaneously while maintaining a consistent tone and evaluation criteria. The end goal, as Elhager describes it, is to make the interaction "indistinguishable from a human one."

Catching Silicon Valley's Attention

The first real test for this product came about a month after its release, when an advertising agency hired Outrove to find offshore Amazon ad specialists and designers. According to Elhager and ElShireef, their system had sourced qualified candidates and begun interviewing them within hours. In five days, it completed one hundred interviews and delivered a shortlist of hires — work that previously took weeks.

They explain that their success proved two things: the product they'd built worked, and it created measurable value. Outrove charged $750 per successful hire, giving them a steady revenue while growing their credibility.

Soon enough, Outrove's progress drew the attention of Y Combinator, which accepted the company into its Summer 2025 batch. The founders raised more than one million dollars from the accelerator and a network of angel investors, using the funding to deepen product development and further grow their client base.

Life in San Francisco shifted their perspective. In Egypt, they were prodigies; in the Bay Area, they were surrounded by equally driven peers — something that only served to fuel their own ambitions. "Here, you go from being the 0.1% to being a normal kid again. So you have to restart the competition — work harder and faster," ElShireef explains.

Redefining the Human Side of Hiring

Now fully settled in San Francisco, the next twelve months are about refinement and reach. Outrove's team is focused on reducing latency in live interviews, improving the realism of its avatars, and building a discovery engine that, if successful, could surface more relevant candidates from a wide range of sources based on a single job description.

The founders also plan to scale beyond small businesses to recruiting agencies that manage thousands of placements, where they would develop more targeted, market-specific outreach campaigns to show how this technology can fill persistent vacancies quickly and affordably.

Elhager describes Outrove's mission as an extension of his lifelong pursuit of mastery. For them, entrepreneurship is less about profit than about perfecting a craft. In Elhager's words, "We wanted to build something significant, not just make money."

With Outrove, Saif Elhager and Ahmed ElShireef are showing how automation doesn't have to mean detachment. By blending empathy with engineering, they've built a system that can improve recruitment for companies while maintaining its necessary human touch. Through this, they're aiming to prove how technology, when built and implemented with a real problem in mind, can make work feel a little more human again.