‘I launched my company before AI was sexy – theatre school helped me’
Mehdi Yahya made a presentation to hundreds of investors with his first artificial intelligence initiative.
Mehdi Yahya’s fascination with data centers began in his childhood. His father worked for a telecom company and took him to the facilities where he first remembered “smells, sounds, noise and extreme cold.”
Yahya’s London-based firm, Ori Industries, has since proven to be an extremely popular property. Eight years after founding the AI infrastructure company – “Before AI was sexy,” he says – and knocking on the doors of hundreds of investors, the UK cloud computing startup last month merged with Radiant, the new AI infrastructure company under global investment giant Brookfield Asset Management.
AI unit Radiant has been given a valuation of $1.3bn (£970m), according to Reuters.
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Yahya says that Ori, which he started from scratch, received many investment offers, but he believes that Brookfield will be the best platform to scale the company.
“It’s especially about what’s coming in AI infrastructure,” he says. “Demand is not slowing down and is constantly increasing. Even if you raise hundreds of millions today, it will still be difficult to catch up with this demand.”
Before Brookfield merged Radiant with Ori, the London startup had raised around $180 million (£135 million) through a mix of equity and debt. February’s deal, meanwhile, caps a so-far tumultuous career for Ori’s CEO and now Radiant chairman.
When we spoke before the reunion, Yahya said he would like nothing better than to one day experience cooking and fishing in the wild lands of Patagonia. It may be necessary to wait a while longer for this.
The merger with Radiant and Ori will usher in global investment in data centers and artificial intelligence. ·Reuters / Reuters
Yahya, who was born in Lebanon and taught himself coding as a teenager, moved to England in 2006 after fleeing his hometown when war broke out. He took a taxi and flew to Damascus and from there to London.
A year later, as a 20-year-old data center networking specialist, he founded his first company, Sama Telecom. “It wasn’t easy, and I thought I knew a lot,” he said. “But it taught me everything about how to make something happen in a company.”
Yahya also developed a deep interest in the arts, and after founding Sama, he attended drama school at the London Drama Center for two years. “Theatre school was important to me because it taught me business and how to sell. It teaches me about people, psychologies and characters, and it really helped my career.”
Wanting to combine technology and art, he later founded Room One and worked on projects such as the Damon Albarn-produced virtual reality wonderland.
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Yahya, who later became a board member of the Royal Court Theatre, does not hail Room One as his best financial venture, but he does testify to many positives. “Getting people talking and getting some of the biggest organizations to work together was a success and certainly laid the groundwork for what was to come later in this space.”
Yahya says that the transition to the first stages of artificial intelligence infrastructure started in 2018, at a time when no one was listening.
“We knocked on every investor’s door and spoke to hundreds of investors, mostly in the UK, Europe and the US. Normally you need a door that opens to you. [London-based venture capital firm Episode 1 Ventures] And that’s how we started.
“It is extremely difficult to develop the thesis that something may happen in the future. It requires endurance, flexibility and keeping up with the times.”
Mehdi Yahya says that attending theater school helped him advance in business life.
Yahya and his team predicted that global infrastructure would transform. “We had two use cases, edge computing like robotics, with machine learning added to that [early AI iteration] and we had to create a new infrastructure platform,” he says.
“It was a bet, and it was based on a vision rather than data and reality. We felt strongly about taking that bet and building a company around it. It became more obvious that this was AI and grad school.” [large language models] in its original form.”
Ori’s core offering was a software platform that allowed customers to access infrastructure. Their customers range from two-person AI startups running their models to large-scale Fortune 500 companies.
It has built two major centers in London and Texas, with 20 centers worldwide. Investments have seen renovations to accommodate AI workloads, build cooling systems, and increase power densities in racks. Yahya adds, “As the industry turns to liquid cooling systems, the power required is also increasing.”
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A survey last year by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and Ipsos found that 39% of UK adults were more likely to see AI as a risk to the economy rather than an opportunity. But Yahya is now at the forefront of an industry where AI infrastructure is predicted to grow to over $400 billion by 2030.
“This saves me time. This does not mean that AI replaces me, it means that it enables me to produce better work,” he says.
“If we believe that AI isn’t going anywhere, then the infrastructure that powers AI isn’t going anywhere. Whatever form AI takes, whether it’s personal or business, there will always be a need for the infrastructure to power it.”
Especially now there is a new player in the market.
Using artificial intelligence in business life
Organizations that leverage artificial intelligence are those that change their internal workflows. It’s how you implement it and the workflows you create that will fundamentally transform businesses and reduce overhead and costs.
Leadership
When I started a company at a very young age, I had to rely on people much older than me. It’s always about people.
Building a company is chaos, and your role as a leader is to create calm in the chaos, thus creating focus and reducing the noise.
My style is to get the best people to work in their environment and create the right environment for them to create their best work.
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