How a Music Streaming CEO Built an Open-Source Global Threat Map in His Spare Time

Frustrated by fragmented war news, Anghami’s Elie Habib built World Monitor, a platform that fuses global data, like aircraft signals and satellite detections, to track conflicts as they unfold.

Elie Habib doesn’t work in the defense or intelligence industries. Instead, he runs Anghami, one of the Middle East’s largest music streaming platforms. But as missiles began flying across the region, a side project he coded earlier this year suddenly became something bigger: an open-source dashboard people around the world were using to track the war in real time.

The engineer turned executive built the system, called World Monitor, to make sense of chaotic geopolitical news. Instead, it went viral.

Habib’s day job revolves around licensing deals and streaming metrics. But during a stretch of increasingly chaotic geopolitical news, he started building a tool to make sense of it. “I’m an engineer by training, and I ...