Starting from the Hiryo app, Egyptian founder Salma Medhat is rethinking personal safety in the MENA region by placing trust-based relationships at the center. Her approach opens broader questions about the evolving relationship between citizens, institutions, and technology.
“My goal is to build the first fully integrated personal safety ecosystem in the MENA region, with proprietary hardware, apps, and SOS devices working together.” Salma Medhat, CEO of Hiryo, speaks with determination as she looks out over Cairo’s traffic from the café where we met her. Her startup combines software, physical devices, and emergency services, adapting them to the cultural characteristics of Middle Eastern and North African societies. Yet beyond the product itself, Hiryo brings to the surface a deeper question increasingly shaping contemporary societies: how does safety change when private technological solutions begin to address needs that were traditionally part of the public sphere?
TAKEAWAYS
Trust as a design choice
Hiryo is an award-winning app, also available on the App Store, that creates a continuous connection with a user’s circle of trust. “Everyone decides who belongs to it,” Medhat explains. “For example, I receive notifications when my younger brothers arrive at their sports club or at school, and when my husband gets to work.” In cases of gender-based violence, road accidents, or medical emergencies, the app immediately alerts all members of the circle and connects the user with local emergency services.
There is also Fly, the first legal personal self-defense device in the MENA region. “It’s a personal physical device designed to emit a loud alarm to deter violence and attract attention,” Medhat explains. “In Europe and the United States this isn’t new, but in our region it is. Now we want to integrate it into the Hiryo app so it can also send real-time notifications and the victim’s location.”
The most significant design choice concerns who is alerted first. “We started from this idea of customizable trust after asking potential users who they would want to call in cases of violence or harassment,” Medhat says. “No one mentioned the police. Many mentioned parents, siblings, partners. That surprised us, and we realized we couldn’t ignore this pattern.”
This design choice reflects a documented reality. According to the World Values Survey, trust in law enforcement varies significantly across regions, with notably lower levels in several MENA countries compared to Northern Europe or North America. Hiryo is not merely responding to a market preference; it is capturing a specific configuration of the relationship between citizens and institutions. The question that follows is crucial: when technology encodes alternative emergency-response models, what kind of relationship is it helping to stabilize? And what other configurations might be possible in different contexts?
The limits of the community-based model
According to Medhat, the effectiveness of the “Circle” is “deeply connected to cultural context, because in many cultures across the MENA region, Africa, and the Middle East, family and community represent the first line of defense, more so than institutions.” Although the app is already used in Europe, the United States, and Asia, the team chose to focus initially on Egypt in order to build a localized ecosystem reflecting this cultural characteristic. “In every country we enter, we will apply the same level of customization. That is what will make our service distinctive.”
This cultural contextualization raises systemic questions. In contexts where domestic violence is among the primary threats faced by women – globally, the WHO estimates that one in three women experiences physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner – what does it mean to design safety around the family unit? What forms of protection exist for those who experience social isolation, belong to marginalized communities, or live in situations where the immediate circle itself is the source of danger? A network-based model presupposes the existence of that network. When it is absent, what systemic alternatives exist – or could be imagined?
There is also the question of how technological platforms position themselves in relation to institutions. When a private solution functionally replaces a public service, is it simply responding to an unmet need, or is it also reshaping expectations about who is responsible for providing protection? Each user who consistently turns to a personal network rather than public authorities contributes to a collective shift. But in which direction is that shift moving, and what kind of social configuration is it producing?
Private safety, social architecture
Medhat’s ambition to create a “complete” personal safety ecosystem raises broader questions about the transformation of traditionally public functions. When safety becomes a technological service, even an accessible one, new forms of stratification emerge. Different levels of protection correspond to different levels of access to devices, connectivity, and functional social networks. This is not specific to Hiryo alone, but points to a wider issue: what happens to welfare and protection systems when functions we consider rights are increasingly delivered by the technology market? And how does the very definition of “safety” change when it shifts from a collective responsibility to a personalized service?
Continuous location monitoring, even when consensual and mediated by trusted relationships, introduces forms of constant transparency that would be described very differently in other contexts. Are we witnessing a shift in the privacy thresholds we consider acceptable in exchange for perceived safety? And is this process (amplified by platforms operating across regions) generating new cultural expectations around autonomy, intimacy, and mutual control that extend well beyond personal safety?
Hiryo’s trajectory is instructive because it makes explicit what many platforms manage implicitly: technological design always embeds assumptions about trust, authority, and power relations. Every design choice – who is alerted, how emergencies are escalated, which data are collected – translates a specific social configuration into code. The question is not whether these choices are right or wrong, but which worlds they make possible, and which they leave out.
Frontier innovation, gender barriers
As she watches Cairo’s traffic, Medhat looks ahead without forgetting the path she has taken, or the effort required to navigate a tech sector still largely dominated by men. “At university there were five women out of twenty-five students. In accelerators and tech startup incubators, I’m still often one of very few women,” she recalls. To avoid being dismissed because of her numerical minority, Medhat developed specific strategies. “I kept telling myself never to turn being a woman or being discriminated against into an excuse,” she explains. “I chose to be very assertive. I show up and participate in meetings even when I’m the only woman, and in interviews I don’t accept questions that assume I will struggle simply because I’m a woman.”
Through her close involvement in the startup ecosystem, Medhat has also observed behavioral differences between male and female entrepreneurial paths. “Men tend to create pitches, talk to investors, and attend events as soon as they have a rough idea. Women, by contrast, often wait until the idea feels perfect, spend a lot of time on the numbers, and avoid talking about their work until they feel completely confident.” In her view, this difference is not inherent to gender but shaped by social conditioning. “That’s why I strongly believe in programs dedicated to women entrepreneurs: they address specific challenges linked to how we are raised and conditioned to behave.” Some behavioral patterns, she argues, require targeted interventions to be dismantled, so that spaces and roles long seen as exclusively male can be occupied by anyone willing to step into them.
