Mahdi Yahya pitched to hundreds of investors with his early AI venture.
Mahdi Yahya’s fascination with data centres began as a child. His father worked in telecoms and took him to facilities where he first remembers the “smells, sounds, the noise and being extremely cold”.
Yahya’s London-based firm, Ori Industries, has since proved to be an extremely hot property. Eight years after launching his AI infrastructure company – “before AI was sexy,” he says – and knocking on hundreds of investors’ doors, his UK cloud computing startup last month merged with Radiant, a new AI infrastructure company under Brookfield Asset Management, the global investment giant.
It gave AI unit Radiant a reported valuation of $1.3bn (£970m), according to Reuters.
Yahya says Ori, which he started from scratch, received multiple investment offers but believed Brookfield would be the best platform to scale the company.
“Especially with what is coming in AI infrastructure,” he says. “The demand is not slowing down and it’s constantly accelerating. Even if you raise hundreds of millions today it will still be hard to capture that demand.”
Before Brookfield merged Radiant with Ori, the London startup had raised around $180m (£135m) in a mix of equity and debt. Meanwhile, February’s deal caps a whirlwind career thus far for Ori’s CEO and now Radiant president.
When we spoke before the merger, Yahya said he would love nothing better to one day experience the wild terrains and fishing in Patagonia. That may have to wait a while longer.
The merger with Radiant and Ori will kickstart global investment into data centres and AI. ·Reuters / Reuters
Born in Lebanon, Yahya, who taught himself coding in his teens, moved to the UK in 2006 after fleeing his homeland when war broke out. He took a taxi to Damascus and from there a flight to London.
A year later he started his first company, Sama Telecom, as a 20-year-old in data centre networking. “It wasn’t easy and I thought I knew a lot,” he said. “But it taught me everything about how to make something happen with a company.”
Yahya also held a deep interest in arts and attended theatre school at Drama Centre London for two years after launching Sama. “Theatre school was important for me as it taught me business and how to sell. It teaches about people, psychologies and characters and it’s really helped my career.”
Wanting to combine tech and the arts, he later set up Room One and worked on projects including Damon Albarn-produced musical fabulous wonder.land, which featured virtual reality.
Yahya, who later became a Royal Court Theatre board member, doesn’t hail Room One as his best venture financially but attests to plenty of positives. “Getting people to talk and some of the largest organisations working together was a success and it definitely laid a foundation for what came later in the space.”
Yahya’s move into the early stages of AI infrastructure began in 2018 at a time, he says, when no-one would listen.
“We knocked on every investor’s door and spoke to hundreds in the UK, Europe and a large portion in the US. Normally you need one door that opens [London-based venture capital firm Episode 1 Ventures] and that’s how we got started.
“Building on a thesis that something might happen in the future is extremely hard. It takes resilience, flexibility and to build with the times.”
Mahdi Yahya says attending theatre school has helped him rise in business.
Yahya and his team figured that global infrastructure would be transforming. “We had two use cases, edge computing like robotics and layered into that was machine learning [early AI iteration] and we needed to build a new infrastructure platform,” he says.
“It was a bet and based on a vision rather than data and reality. We felt strongly in taking on that bet and building a company around that. It became clearer that that was AI and LLMs [large language models] in its first form.”
Ori’s core offering was a software platform that allowed customers to access the infrastructure. Its customers vary from two-people AI startups to run its models to large scale Fortune 500 companies.
It built two major centres in London and Texas, with 20 centres globally. Investment has seen refits to host AI workloads, building the cooling systems and power densities in the racks. “The power needed is going up, with the industry now going into liquid cooling systems,” adds Yahya.
Last, year, a poll conducted by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and Ipsos suggested that 39% of UK adults are more inclined to view AI as a risk for the economy than an opportunity. But Yahya is now at the forefront of an industry which is set to see AI infrastructure grow to over $400bn by 2030.
“It saves me time. It doesn’t mean AI is replacing me, it means it is making me produce better work,” he says.
“If we believe that AI is not going anywhere, therefore the infrastructure powering AI will not go anywhere. No matter what shape AI takes, be it personal or in business, the infrastructure needed to power that will always be needed.”
Especially now there is a new player in the market.
Using AI in business
The organisations that thrive on AI are the ones that change the internal workflows. It’s how you apply it and the workflows you build which will fundamentally transform businesses and reduce overheads and costs.
Leadership
Starting a company very young 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 within chaos, and therefore creating focus and reducing the noise.
My style is hands off to get the best people that can operate within their environment and I create their right environment to create their best work.
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