The Founder & Dexter's Story

Dexter started with a problem its founder Zaid Arafeh had to solve for himself.

While doing his masters degree, Zaid found that the hardest part of a semester wasn’t the coursework, it was keeping track of it. Deadlines, materials and expectations lived in different places, and staying on top of them took real effort that had nothing to do with learning. Every student he asked described the same thing. Later market research confirmed it.

What made that frustrating was knowing how solvable it was. Zaid has spent 20 years in technology and 12 in product management, most recently leading large-scale AI and recommendation products at Meta, the systems behind Facebook, Instagram and Threads.

But the work that shaped Dexter most was about trust. At TikTok he led AI products for fraud, account security and API abuse prevention. At Google he led AI initiatives in Workspace Abuse & Safety, protecting 2.6 billion monthly users. At Microsoft he helped bring machine-learning security technologies out of research and into commercial products.

Dexter is where those two threads meet. A student tool has to be genuinely useful, it has to understand the real context of your courses, not just sound clever. And anything that connects to a student’s academic record has to be something a university can trust it with. Dexter is built to be both.

Connect with Zaid and say hello on LinkedIn.