Mahdi Shariff

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Mahdi Shariff is co-founder of Humble AI, a London- and Cambridge-based startup building AI assistants that help small and mid-sized B2B teams automate sales workflows and other repetitive operational work. The company's pitch is that the productivity gains promised by AI shouldn't only be available to enterprises with the budget for custom development, and Humble's product is designed to slot into the tools its customers already use rather than replacing them.

Shariff studied chemistry with management at the University of Warwick and started his career at EY in technology, media and telecoms. He spent several years working in China, where he held senior roles at Ciklum as VP of digital transformation and earlier at Biddingx as chief strategy officer. The China stint became formative — he joined a startup there without speaking Mandarin and helped scale it through several growth phases — and shaped his thinking about where AI could most usefully be applied to everyday work.

He co-founded Humble in 2022 with Niluka Satharasinghe, whom he had first met more than a decade earlier through Entrepreneur First. The company has raised funding from investors including Frontline Ventures, Cur8 Capital and Kapor Capital, and has gone through Google's accelerator programme. Outside Humble, Shariff is an active angel investor — earlier bets include Pathao, Purple.ai and SilkFred — and a member of Founders Pledge.