Tarek Elsamni

Tarek Elsamni

20 years in engineering. Building Xplain
#43888225 followers8 following
🔥 39 day streak
>10,000All time
6 KP

About

I'm Tarek, Founder and CEO of Xplain. I've spent about 20 years in engineering, mostly cloud, DevOps, and platform work at places like GE, SAP, Maersk, and Deloitte, and I run a consultancy called Shebang Labs. Xplain started at home. One of my daughters asked me a question and every AI tool I tried gave her something written for an adult. So we built the thing I wanted her to have: ask anything by voice, text, or photo, and get back a real narrated lesson with illustrations, pitched at her age and in her language. I'm based between Cambridge, Dubai and Egypt, and I care a lot about building for kids in this region specifically, in Arabic, not as an afterthought. Happy to talk about ed-tech, AI infrastructure, or what it's like shipping a consumer app from MENA.

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Maker History

  • Xplain AI
    Xplain AIWhere Curious Kids Become Super Learners
    Aug 2026
    • 🎉
    Joined Product HuntFebruary 2nd, 2016

Forums

Xplain AIp/xplain-ai•

1mo ago

What was the first question your kid asked an AI?

I built Xplain because of one of mine.

She asked me something I couldn't answer properly, so I handed her the AI tools I use every day for work. Every single one gave her a wall of text written for a 40-year-old engineer. She read two lines, said "okay," and stopped asking.

That bothered me more than it should have. The models are good enough now. The interface just wasn't built for her. A curious eight-year-old doesn't want a chat window, she wants someone to explain it to her out loud, with pictures, at her level, in her language.

So Xplain turns a kid's question into an actual narrated lesson with illustrations, broken into small steps, pitched at their age. Ask by voice, text, or photo. There's a character called Xplore who crashed on Earth and needs their questions to refuel his ship home, which turns out to be a much better motivator than a progress bar.

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1mo ago

Xplain AI - Where Curious Kids Become Super Learners

Kids ask "why" about a hundred times a day. Xplain AI is built for question number ninety-nine. Ages 6 to 18 ask anything by voice, text, or photo, in +70 languages, and get an explanation pitched at their level, with narration and original illustrations. Each answer opens the next question instead of closing the subject. Curiosity is the whole product. We just made sure nothing gets in its way.
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