Muhammad Farooq Rathod: from airport IT rooms to a portfolio of startups and a mentoring practice

Muhammad Farooq Rathod describes himself as a serial entrepreneur, startup founder and investor. Those are three labels that many people claim. In his case the record behind them is long and unusually well documented. He has spent more than 20 years in IT operations, transformation work and startup leadership, and today he runs a set of companies from Lisbon and the San Francisco Bay Area while advising early-stage founders one to one.

Readers of this site should know one thing up front: Rathod is the founder of European Startup Insider. This profile is drawn from the public record he keeps on his own website, including his career history, his ventures, his awards, his talks and the recommendations colleagues have left for him over the years.

A first job in Kampala, then a classroom in Karachi

His working life began far from the startup world. From September 1998 to February 2001 he worked as an office assistant for Mowlem Constructions East Africa in Kampala, Uganda. His father, who has written about him publicly, recalls that the boy had a computer at home at a time when few children in their community did, and that his father's British bosses admired him and gave him small pieces of work while he was still young.

He studied software engineering at Aptech Computer Education in Pakistan. He did well enough that the school later brought him back to teach. A former teacher wrote that it was his academic ability and hunger to learn that persuaded management to make him a faculty member. In 2003 he worked as an assistant facilitator at Aptech in Karachi. Two decades later Aptech still counts him among its success stories: he received a Star Alumni gold medal at its 2020 to 2021 convocation, and in November 2024 the school featured him in a video reel and invited him onto the first episode of its podcast to advise new software graduates.

In 2005 he also spent time in the United Kingdom, in business development at Carillion and Mowlem Railways in Bracknell.

Nearly twenty years inside Emirates Group

The longest chapter of his career was at Gerry's dnata, the Emirates Group ground-handling and aviation services company in Karachi. He joined in October 2003 as a junior member of staff. His former manager, Syed Asad Azam, remembers that by the time he himself left, Rathod was Manager IT for Pakistan, running the network, systems, software and support teams and looking after more than 700 pieces of IT equipment across the company's stations.

His title for most of that time was IT Functional Head, and from October 2018 he was also Head of IT and Business Administration, until May 2020. After a break to run his own company, he came back as Head of IT and Projects from December 2021 to September 2022.

The work was practical and close to airport operations. Colleagues describe him writing software for the ramp, cargo and HR teams, and building out the department until it worked as a service provider for the whole business. A colleague from another team put it simply:

"He has literally set up Gerry's dnata IT department from scratch."

A Cathay Pacific manager in Karachi recalled a fibre-optic link he proposed and installed between the airline's airport office and the baggage arrivals desk, so lost-luggage records could be traced before the peak season. A flydubai manager thanked him for the IT support his team gave when that airline started flying from Karachi in 2010.

The innovation lab and its products

Inside the company he founded BRAIN, short for Business Research and Innovation Nest, which became the official innovation lab at Gerry's dnata. It ran on volunteers known as WIRES, held idea events under the name BRAINx and worked on digital, efficiency and sustainability projects for aviation and ground services.

Two of its projects travelled further than Karachi. LAMP, a cloud-based platform for managing airport lounge access, was later rolled out by the Dubai headquarters to other stations in the group, including Zanzibar. CUBES (Computerized Undertaking of Benefited e-Paper Services) replaced paper requests with an electronic system that tracked approvals in real time, kept backups of the data and produced custom reports. In 2025 he said that a second version of the lab, BR@IN 2.0, would be launched in the United States.

He was also part of the dnata team that collected air cargo requirements from around the world, chose a single cloud cargo system and put it into service at international airports.

The Emirates Group gave him its Najm Award in February 2016 for the timely rollout of a DCS solution that supported ground operations and the airlines it served. Back in June 2007 the vice president of Gerry's dnata Pakistan had recognised his part in the internal audit that led to ISO 14001:2004 certification.

JOBS DRONES: a jobs marketplace on a phone

In May 2020 he left the airport world to become chief executive of his own company, JOBS DRONES, in Karachi. The free app listed more than 200 kinds of verified service providers, from lawyers and teachers to plumbers and tour operators, so people could find nearby help and workers could find paid jobs.

The venture got public attention quickly. In November 2020 he was the guest on episode 11 of Achievers, a Faiz TV programme hosted by Ali Salman Anchan, and in February 2021 he spoke about digital work on the channel's morning show, Apna Pakistan. That same month he addressed students and job seekers at an Aptech job fair in Karachi. In January 2021 JOBS DRONES was presented at the Kamyab Jawan Program at the Prime Minister's Secretariat and signed a memorandum of understanding with the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government on creating jobs. In April 2021 he was invited to meet the senior management of Shaheen Foundation PAF to discuss artificial intelligence and robotics in aviation.

He ran the company until November 2021.

The move to Europe

An essay he published in April 2023, Why I Left My Country for Europe, explains why he gave up a senior technology career in Pakistan for a new start: he wanted to keep growing, live among new cultures and work inside a more developed innovation scene.

His first steps into the European startup scene came through programmes in Riga, Latvia. In 2021 he took part in masterclasses in Riga on founding and scaling a startup, run with Riga Technical University, Riga Business School, Commercialization Reactor and the Latvian investment agency LIAA. He also followed the How to Startup course from TechHub Riga, funded with the European Regional Development Fund. In November 2021 he was named the top and most active participant at Commercialization Reactor's 17th Ignition Event Europe. A later essay looks back on an innovation and research residency of two years and eight months among researchers and founders in Northern Europe, and on what it suggests for space and satellite startups.

He also became an Estonian e-resident, and wrote a first-hand account of how a state digital identity lets a founder run a company from anywhere.

Lisbon came next. In 2023 he led strategic business development and growth at Data Magnum, where vice president Francisco J. Ferrão worked with him as a project portfolio manager. Ferrão later wrote a long recommendation praising how he planned, delivered on budget and held together teams from different cultures, ending with a line many colleagues echo:

"His technical talents are matched only by his heart for people."

From May to October 2023 he was a project manager with Sónia Morgado SMCS, a European immigration and global mobility practice, and from June 2023 he also advised it on digital strategy as chief digital strategy and business consultant. In February 2024 he appeared live on RTP, Portugal's public broadcaster, on television and radio, to congratulate the immigration agency AIMA on opening an online booking portal for family reunification appointments.

In January 2025 he announced that he had received recognition for extraordinary ability, as he began a new chapter in the United States.

Six companies, one approach

His site lists seven current founder roles, and the companies behind them fall into a few clear groups.

Technology Yours, founded in Houston in January 2010, is the oldest. It provides cloud, software development, cybersecurity, data, AI and project management services, and helps businesses move to Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. It is also the technology partner behind Jobnur, a skilled-trades app based in Katy, Texas, which he has led as founder and CEO since July 2024. Jobnur lets customers get live bids around the clock from verified local handymen for cleaning, electrical, plumbing, heating and cooling, and gardening work.

PortugalTaxis.com, also started in July 2024, is a tourist-friendly ride-hailing service in Lisbon that connects passengers with licensed TVDE drivers, with an emphasis on clear pricing.

Two of his companies are media businesses. Texas Startup Insider, launched in Austin in September 2024, covers founders, funding, events and market trends in Texas. European Startup Insider, launched in Lisbon in December 2024, publishes news and analysis for entrepreneurs, investors and the people who work with them. In July 2025 it opened Elite Studio, a professional podcast studio in Sintra.

Since March 2025 he has also been founder and CEO of Upstride Holdings, LDA, a Lisbon-based holding and investment company focused on long-term investments and international partnerships.

His own summary of the thread running through all of this is short: test the problem, build the model, and give the team solid operating foundations before trying to grow.

On stage and in writing

He speaks often. In November 2024 he was a guest speaker at the launch of Binary Horizon at the Lisbon Marriott, talking to founders, investors, officials and ambassadors about building startup communities and supporting founders who have moved from abroad. At Startup Summit Lisbon in September 2026 he spoke on go-to-market and product-market fit, with a Unicorn Stage keynote titled From Zero to Series A: What Nobody Tells You. He also took part in the Canada Gateway Expo 2026 in Brampton as a speaker, mentor and panellist, and in July 2025 he recorded a leadership podcast with European Startup Insider about the mission behind it.

The articles he publishes on LinkedIn follow the same interests as his companies. He has written about why drone deliveries and flying taxis are still held back by batteries, safety and air-traffic control; about turning rooftops into landing sites for drones; about airports and hospitals designed around the people using them; and about live, multilingual maps for public transport. Other pieces ask why some startups succeed while others fail, argue that companies should respect candidates' time in hiring, and look at e-paper, blockchain basics and automatic translation of video.

In October 2024 an international digital magazine based in France, International Personalities, published his biography.

Credentials and what colleagues say

The formal qualifications on his profile come from the operations side of his career: PRINCE2, ITIL, COBIT 5 and Scrum Product Owner, plus training in agile project management with Jira, strategic thinking for senior leaders, ISO and quality management internal auditing, MCSE and A+ hardware repair.

Nineteen people have left public recommendations for him. They include former managers, people who reported to him, airline clients, a teacher and a university friend. The same points come up again and again: he is calm under pressure, he gives his team ownership, and he keeps learning. Shehzad Ali, who has known him for nearly twenty years, calls him a natural problem solver who finds a way forward with whatever resources are at hand.

Working with founders

Today the main way founders can work with him is through paid advisory sessions. His site describes direct one-to-one mentoring for founders at any stage, from idea and pre-seed through seed, Series A and later rounds, as well as for bootstrapped companies. The work covers financial modelling, cap table structure and getting ready for investors. To keep it personal, he takes on at most four founders a quarter. Applicants send a short brief about their company and then pay for the session through Stripe.

The questions he puts to founders are simple ones. What does your team actually need from you right now? What could you stop doing this week? For founders building in Europe or the United States, the person asking them has run airport IT systems, launched a jobs marketplace, moved country and started half a dozen companies.