Believe It, Prepare for It, Be Yourself: Seif Eldeen Ibrahim Wins the Canopy People’s Choice Award

https://matrixhq.ai/What makes one startup pitch stand out when an audience has spent an evening watching talented founders demo ambitious ideas?

Sometimes it is the innovation.  Sometimes it is the traction.  Sometimes it is the person telling the story.

At our August 2026 Remote & Global Demo Night, Seif Eldeen Ibrahim demonstrated just how powerful that combination can be, winning the Canopy People’s Choice Award after representing the team behind Matrix.

His win also offers a useful lesson for every first-time founder preparing to pitch an MVP, meet an investor or win their first customers:

Believe in what you are building. Prepare properly. Then give people the opportunity to see you.

Meet Seif Eldeen Ibrahim

Seif is a senior AI engineer working with entrepreneur Marcin Kierdelewicz and leading the team's technical capability in Cairo.  He is also still a student.

Seif is completing a dual-degree programme, studying computer engineering and software systems at Ain Shams University in Egypt alongside a degree connected with the University of East London.

He has already been coding for around six years. That combination of academic study and real-world technology development puts Seif at the centre of an interesting transition.

He experienced software development before the current generation of AI tools. Now, he uses AI throughout his work.

Rather than seeing AI as a replacement for technical talent, Seif and Marcin see it as an accelerator for it.  That distinction matters.

What is Matrix?

Matrix is built around a problem many businesses already recognise.

Companies have extraordinary amounts of data. Yet extracting useful intelligence from that data can remain surprisingly difficult.

Marcin's background spans process automation, data integration and business intelligence. Over time, he became increasingly convinced that many of the tools available to management teams had failed to keep pace with what technology could now make possible.

Matrix takes a different approach.  The ambition is to allow business leaders to connect their systems and ask questions about their company data using plain English.

Instead of navigating complex tools simply to understand what is happening, a manager can start with the question she actually wants answered.

But there is an important architectural principle behind the platform.

Marcin explained that Matrix has been designed so the underlying business records do not need to be passed directly to large language models. AI can help prepare the answer without automatically seeing the company's raw data.

From there, the vision extends beyond business intelligence.  The model becomes a continuous loop:

Intelligence → Strategy → Execution.

Understand what is happening in the business. Develop a strategy for improving it. Then use AI agents to support execution.

As execution changes the underlying business, new data becomes available and the cycle begins again.

For founders and early-stage investors, it is an interesting example of where applied AI is heading: away from AI as a standalone novelty and towards AI embedded within real business workflows.

Building software differently with AI

Seif has also helped develop the team's methodology for building software in this new environment.

They call it 10x Factory.

The premise is straightforward: software development today should not necessarily look like software development five years ago.

AI can dramatically accelerate parts of the development process. For a founder building an MVP, that creates the potential to test ideas, learn from customers and iterate significantly faster.

But faster does not mean careless.

Marcin emphasises the importance of maintaining process around AI-enabled development: documentation, planning, management approval and disciplined delivery remain important.

This is a useful distinction for first-time founders.

The objective isn't simply to build an MVP faster.

It is to learn faster.

Speed creates value when it shortens the distance between an assumption and evidence from a real customer.

Why did Seif win the People’s Choice?

Technology was only part of the story.

Seif brought something equally important to Demo Night: energy.

Even through a screen, his enthusiasm was obvious.

He believed in what he was presenting.

People felt it.

But there was something behind that apparently natural performance that founders should pay attention to.

Preparation.

Marcin and Seif ran through the presentation before Demo Night. There were things to improve. Seif took the feedback seriously, went away and practised.

And practised.

By the time he delivered the live demo, the preparation had created confidence.

That matters because founders sometimes make the mistake of believing that rehearsing a pitch will make them sound rehearsed.

Frequently, the opposite is true.

When you don't know your material well enough, your brain is concentrating on remembering what comes next.

When you have practised repeatedly, you create cognitive space.

You can listen.

You can react.

You can smile.

You can make eye contact.

You can tell the story rather than recite the slides.

Your personality finally gets room to appear.

A lesson for every first-time founder

When we asked Seif what advice he would give to the next founder stepping up at a Canopy Demo Night, his answer was beautifully simple:

Believe in what you are building and be yourself.

Marcin added the ingredient people don't always see:

Do the preparation.

That combination extends far beyond Demo Night.

It matters when you pitch an investor.

It matters when you meet your first major customer.

It matters when you are trying to persuade an exceptional person to join your startup.

Your audience is assessing the business opportunity, but they are also assessing you.

Do you understand the problem?

Have you done the work?

Do you believe this should exist?

And perhaps most importantly: do I believe you are going to keep going when building it becomes difficult?

Seif gave his audience reasons to answer yes.

That's why we're delighted to celebrate Seif Eldeen Ibrahim as the Canopy People's Choice winner for August 2026.

Congratulations to Seif, Marcin and the wider Matrix team.

We can't wait to see what happens next.

Connect with Seif, Marcin and Matrix

Discover what the team is building at Matrix.

Connect with Seif Eldeen Ibrahim on LinkedIn and follow his journey across AI, software engineering and the development of Matrix.

Connect with Marcin Kierdelewicz on LinkedIn to learn more about Matrix, AI-enabled business intelligence and the team's approach to building technology differently.

And if you're preparing for your own startup Demo Night, investor pitch or customer presentation, take Seif's winning formula with you:

Believe it. Prepare for it. Be yourself.

https://youtu.be/jrA7spoOsts Watch the full interview back