How a lost startup fuelled a mission to rebuild Syria’s entrepreneurial ecosystem

27 June 2026. Ahmad Sufian Bayram’s story has all the elements of Mediterranean resilience, innovation and responsibility: homeland, startups and ecosystems. The Syrian entrepreneur began his journey at the young age of 19 with a small customised gift business. Two years later, in 2012, the Syrian war forced him to leave the country and the venture faltered. This professional struggle drove what became an almost personal quest to understand just how entrepreneurial ecosystems shape startups and to apply this knowledge to his home country.

For more than a decade since, he has rallied support for Syrian entrepreneurs both inside the country and across the diaspora through several initiatives and leadership positions including at the Syrian-British organisation Jusoor, the US-based Techstars, and Blackbox, which supports emerging founders and refugee-led entrepreneurship. He also started his own initiative, Startup Syria, well before the events of December 2024 to gather data on Syrian startups and the challenges they faced.

Today, a special advisor on innovation and startups to the Syrian Minister of Communications and Information Technology, he continues to help support the country’s economic and social recovery. This comes at a time when Syria is seeking to rebuild its institutions and reopen to the rest of the world, including its Euro-Mediterranean neighbours.

After the end of a devastating 14-year war that reduced Syria’s GDP to less than a half its pre-conflict level, the country resumed its membership of the UfM in June 2025 and is now working to expand its participation in Euro-Mediterranean frameworks that contribute to its reconstruction. Ahmad, along with many other Syrian officials and stakeholders, has taken part in UfM events since the summer of 2025. We met him on the margins of the UfM High-Level Conference on Employment and Labour, held in Malta in mid-October 2025.

Ahmad Sufian Bayram, centre, during a panel discussion on research valorisation at the UfM High-Level Conference on Employment and Labour, Malta, 13 October 2025.

For him, like many of his compatriots, service and social responsibility are key to collective survival. Syria stood at the crossroads of Mediterranean and Silk Road trade routes for centuries, nurturing a strong tradition of commerce, craftsmanship and entrepreneurship. The war, however, interrupted much of that potential and dispersed many of the country’s innovators and business leaders. That rupture forced Ahmad look outward, learn from other ecosystems and think about how such experiences could one day serve Syria’s recovery. He saw in the Syrian diaspora an opportunity to accumulate knowledge and cultivate it for the day the country was ready to welcome its people back.

“Entrepreneurship is not only about founding companies or creating jobs,” Ahmad says. “At its core, it begins with the ability to read the everyday problems people face and search for practical solutions that can be implemented and scaled.” Yet in fragile contexts, such solutions cannot survive on a founder’s passion or ingenuity alone, he adds. They need a full ecosystem around them: clear laws, appropriate financing, incubators, mentors, networks of trust, and markets that are able to absorb innovation. This vision is aligned with the conclusions of the Second UfM Progress Report on Regional Integration, prepared in partnership with the OECD, which underlines the importance of supporting entrepreneurship through financing, regulatory reform and capacity-building measures.

Ahmad Sufian Bayram the Syrian National Agenda for Startups 2026–2030, Damascus, 14 April 2026 (Source LinkedIn).

Since taking office, Bayram has contributed to a growing number of national initiatives aimed at strengthening Syria’s startups. He worked on the preparations for the first Syrian National Agenda for Startups 2026–2030, contributed to the launch of the Syrian Alliance of Incubators and Accelerators, and supported the organisation of the Syrian Startups Summit in 2025. He was also named a member of the Board of Trustees of the Syrian Excellence and Creativity Authority.

In April 2026, Startup Syria, the NGO founded by Ahmad years earlier, organised Syria’s first Global Entrepreneurship Week in partnership with Sanad Youth and Jusoor. With more than 90 events across 22 cities, it served as a space for founders, mentors, institutions and young innovators to connect, an early sign of greater national coordination in this domain.

Ahmad Sufian Bayram presenting at the UfM Seminar on Refugee Entrepreneurship, Cairo, 11 December 2024.

Ahmad’s journey is not simply the story of an entrepreneur who began with a small business and later moved into public service. It is an example of the transition from an individual idea to building ecosystems that both Syria and the wider Euro-Mediterranean region need if entrepreneurship is to become a genuine driver of economic and social recovery.