[Editor's Note: Anaiz Gul Fareed is a member of the TWA Editorial Board and is the author of previous TWA articles.]
Muhammad Karimi, SPE, is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Saher Flow Solutions, a deep-tech company established to develop next-generation industrial sensing technologies for the energy sector.
As the technology leader of Saher Flow Solutions, Karimi led the development and commercialization of a novel non-nuclear, IoT-enabled multiphase flowmeter (MPFM). The technology eliminates the need for radioactive gamma sources traditionally used in multiphase flow measurement. Under his technical leadership, the company successfully scaled from a research spin-off to an international technology provider, exporting its systems across North America, Africa, and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).
He has secured more than $5 million in research grants and equity financing to help establish one of the GCC's first homegrown company dedicated to developing and manufacturing MPFM technology.
His research contributions include more than 30 peer-reviewed publications and over 10 granted patents. His work has been recognized through numerous international awards, including the IEEE Best Research Paper Award, IEEE Three Minute Thesis Award, IEEE Sensors Council Technical Achievement Award, SPE Rising Star Award at the ATCE Energy Startup Competition, and the King's Prize in the Inventor Category.
He holds a holds a BS degree in electrical engineering from the University of Engineering and Technology, Pakistan, and a PhD in radio-frequency engineering from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.
He was recently named a 2026 TWA Energy Influencer and sat down with TWA to discuss what this recognition means to him, his career path, and his advice to students and young professionals.
Anaiz Gul Fareed (AGF): Thank you so much for taking out time for this, and congratulations on being named a TWA Energy Influencer. Can we start what this recognition means to you, reflecting on your journey from Pakistan to becoming a leading energy expert?
Muhammad Karimi (MK): Being named a TWA Energy Influencer for 2026 is genuinely humbling, especially reflecting on the distance traveled—from a small town in Pakistan, through a PhD in microwave/RF engineering at KAUST, to co-founding a deep-tech hardware company in Saudi Arabia’s energy sector. It is a recognition not just of my own work, but of what is possible when rigorous academic research is carried all the way through to a product that operators actually trust in the field. I see it as validation that deep-tech innovation does not have to originate in Silicon Valley or Houston—it can come from the Gulf, built by engineers who understand the problem from the inside.
AGF: For this prestigious award, TWA evaluates nominees on technical credentials, industry impact, and community contribution. Looking back, which one of these do you feel your work has moved the needle on the most?
MK: If I am honest, I would say industry impact is where my work has moved the needle the most—taking our patented dual mutually orthogonal resonator (DMOR) technology from a lab concept into a pre-qualified, deployable product inside Saudi Aramco’s operations is the achievement I am proudest of. Technical credentials opened the door, but it is real-world adoption, replacing radioactive-gamma-based multiphase meters with a safer, AI-enabled alternative, that actually changes how the industry manages the hydrocarbon production. That said, I hope community contribution catches up as we scale and train the next generation of Saudi and regional engineers.
AGF: I want to use this platform to ask: Who are the mentors or moments you'd point to as decisive in getting you to where you are today?
MK: Atif Shamim, my PhD advisor at KAUST, was decisive—he gave me the freedom to chase a real industrial problem rather than a purely academic one, and that mindset is still the DNA of Saher Flow Solutions today. My early research collaboration with Saudi Aramco was another turning point. Sitting with reservoir and production engineers taught me what ‘field-ready’ actually means. And the moment I chose to file our first patent rather than simply publish the result was the moment I started thinking like a founder instead of a researcher.
AGF: Let’s talk about some of your academic foundation. In my research, I found that you were brilliant in your studies right from your undergrad days. What made you choose to do a PhD after engineering? Why did you choose KAUST? And how did the research environment at KAUST shape the direction of your career?
MK: I chose to pursue an MS/PhD after my undergraduate engineering degree because I wanted to go deep on one problem rather than move quickly across many shallow ones, and industrial microwave sensing was exactly that kind of problem. KAUST stood out because it combined world-class laboratories with a deliberate mandate to solve real Saudi and regional industrial challenges, not just publish papers. That environment—proximity to Saudi Aramco, generous research funding, and a culture that rewarded translating science into products—shaped my entire trajectory toward entrepreneurship.
AGF: Your doctoral work centered on microwave sensors for multiphase fluids, corrosion, leakage, and pipe-wall thickness. Was there a specific research problem or moment during your PhD that planted the seed for what became Saher Flow Solutions?
MK: My doctoral research centered on microwave sensors for multiphase fluids, corrosion, leakage, and pipe-wall thickness, and the seed for Saher Flow Solutions was planted when I realized the same physics I was using to characterize materials in the lab could measure oil, water, and gas simultaneously without a radioactive gamma source. That single insight—that a purely electromagnetic approach could replace decades-old gamma-ray technology—became the founding idea behind our patented microwave DMOR technology. It was less a single ‘eureka moment’ and more a growing conviction, paper after paper, that this belonged in the field and not only in journals.
AGF: You moved from KAUST research into a research collaboration with Saudi Aramco before going the startup route. What did that industry exposure teach you that pure academic research hadn't?
MK: Collaborating with Saudi Aramco before starting the company was the best crash course I could have had—it taught me that a technology can be scientifically elegant and still fail in the field if it is expensive, cannot survive high pressure, temperature swings, corrosive environments, and years of unattended operation. Academic research optimizes for novelty and precision under controlled conditions; industry demands reliability, repeatability, and a genuine business case. That exposure fundamentally reshaped how I approached product design, and it is the reason Saher was built field-first from day one.
AGF: Many people who are not energy aware believe oil and gas supplies are running out and that within 10–15 years there won't be any left, even though fossil fuels still supply more than 75% of the world's primary energy today. As someone who has worked inside Saudi Aramco, one of the world's leading energy companies, how do you respond to this belief that fossil fuel resources are on the verge of running out?
MK: Having worked inside Saudi Aramco, I can say with confidence that the narrative of oil and gas ‘running out’ within 10 to 15 years does not match the data—fossil fuels still supply more than 75% of the world’s primary energy, and proven reserves, recovery technology, and exploration continue to expand the usable resource base. The real conversation should not be about scarcity; it should be about efficiency, emissions, and responsible production through a long transition period. That is actually the premise our own technology is built on: extracting more value with lower emissions from existing fields, rather than assuming a trillion-dollar industry, a backbone of several industrial products, not just fuel, disappears overnight.
AGF: For readers who aren't sensor specialists, how would you explain what a multiphase flowmeter actually does, and why accurate measurement of oil, water, and gas together is such a hard engineering problem?
MK: A multiphase flowmeter measures oil, water, and gas flowing together through a pipeline without needing to separate them first, which sounds simple but is genuinely difficult, because the mixture’s composition and flow pattern change constantly and unpredictably. Traditional approaches have relied on radioactive gamma-ray sources to estimate the mix, which brings safety, regulatory, and logistical burdens with them. Getting an accurate, real-time reading using only electromagnetic sensing, as we do, requires solving genuinely hard physics and signal-processing problems at the sensor level.
AGF: Your company Saher Flow's core innovation is your patented DMOR technology. What's the intuition behind it, and what specifically does it let you do that traditional gamma-ray-based multiphase meters can't?
MK: The intuition behind DMOR is that if you excite a pipe cross section with two orthogonal electromagnetic resonators, with pipe and its contents being the substrate medium, each resonator responds differently to the dielectric and conductive properties of oil, water, and gas. Solving for both simultaneously gives us enough independent information to resolve the full multiphase composition without needing a gamma source. That is the fundamental advantage over gamma-ray meters: no nuclear material, no source replacement, no added regulatory overhead, and a sensor that can be recalibrated through software rather than hardware intervention.
AGF: Removing radioactive sources from flowmeters isn't just a technical choice. It touches safety, regulation, transport, and field logistics. How much of the market pull toward Saher's technology has been about performance vs. simply not wanting radioactive material on location?
MK: Honestly, it is both, but the non-radioactive angle opens doors that performance alone would not. Operators are drawn to DMOR because it eliminates the safety case, transport permits, source licensing, and decommissioning liability that come with radioactive meters, which alone can make procurement and field deployment dramatically simpler. But it only wins long-term because the underlying measurement performance is genuinely competitive, so we never have to trade off safety for accuracy.
AGF: Saher pairs the DMOR hardware with AI and a digital twin technology approach to reduce recalibration needs. How do you think about the split between what the physics/hardware should solve vs. what you hand off to the AI layer?
MK: My philosophy is that the physics and hardware should do the heavy lifting on measurement fundamentals—DMOR captures rich, unambiguous electromagnetic data—while AI and our digital twin layer handle the variability that is too complex or costly to model deterministically in real time, such as drift compensation and adapting to changing fluid properties over a field’s lifetime. I am cautious about leaning on AI to compensate for hardware limitations; it should extend a fundamentally sound sensor, not paper over a weak one. That discipline is what lets us reduce recalibration needs without sacrificing trust in the numbers.
AGF: You've held both CTO and CEO roles at your company. What was the mindset shift like moving from ‘the person solving the technical problem’ to ‘the person responsible for the whole business?’
MK: Moving from CTO to CEO meant shifting from optimizing one variable, whether the technology was correct, to balancing many at once: cash runway, hiring, customer relationships, and investor expectations, alongside the technology itself. As an engineer, I was trained to find the single right answer; as a CEO, I had to get comfortable making decisions with incomplete information and owning the consequences for the whole team, not just the R&D function. It is a humbling shift, but my technical grounding still helps me ask the right questions, even when I am no longer the one solving the equations myself.
AGF: Getting a deep-tech hardware product pre-qualified by an operator like Saudi Aramco is a long, rigorous process. What did that qualification journey actually look like, and what would you tell another founder trying to sell hard tech into oil and gas?
MK: Getting DMOR qualified by Saudi Aramco took years of rigorous field trials, documentation, and third-party validation against their exacting reliability and safety standards—there is no shortcut through an operator of that scale and risk tolerance. My advice to another founder selling hard tech into oil and gas is to budget far more time and capital for qualification than you think you need, build relationships with the engineers who will actually use your product, rather than only procurement, and treat every field trial as a chance to harden the technology, rather than just prove a point.
AGF: Saher Flow describes itself as ‘made in Saudi Arabia, trusted globally,’ and ties into the Vision 2030 localization narrative. How central has that positioning been to your growth, and how are you thinking about international expansion beyond the Gulf?
MK: Being ‘made in Saudi Arabia, trusted globally’ has been central to our growth story—it aligns directly with Vision 2030’s localization goals and gives us real credibility with Saudi and regional operators who want to see homegrown deep-tech succeed. As we expand beyond the Gulf, we are leaning on the fact that Aramco-grade qualification is one of the toughest bars in the industry. If the technology works here, operators elsewhere take notice, and that opens conversations in other producing regions on its own merits. This is evident from our expansion across four countries worldwide beyond Gulf and it demonstrates that the Gulf region can produce and export globally competitive deep-tech products.
AGF: You've spoken publicly on the world's energy outlook and even nuclear energy policy. How do you see your work in oilfield measurement technology connecting to the broader energy transition conversation. Is better measurement itself a decarbonization lever?
MK: I genuinely believe better measurement is an underrated decarbonization lever—you cannot manage what you cannot measure, and accurate real-time multiphase data lets operators reduce flaring, optimize production, and cut methane and CO2 emissions from existing operations immediately, not decades from now. My work sits at an interesting intersection: it does not replace the broader energy transition conversation, but it makes the oil and gas industry we still depend on today meaningfully cleaner while renewables scale up. That is the pragmatic, responsible transition I believe in.
AGF: As someone who has a closer look of Saudi Arabia's energy outlook and the global energy industry, how differently do you see the energy transition playing out in emerging markets that are more dependent on energy imports?
MK: Energy transition looks very different depending on whether an economy exports or imports energy. In Saudi Arabia, we can invest in efficiency and lower-carbon production because oil and gas revenue itself funds diversification through Vision 2030. Import-dependent emerging markets face a much harder trade-off, where energy security and affordability often have to come before decarbonization ambitions, so their transition path needs to be paced differently, with more emphasis on efficiency gains and access to technology, like ours, that improves output from resources they already have.
AGF: What advice would you give an engineering student today who has a research idea they suspect could become a company, but no idea how to take that first step?
MK: Talk to the people who would actually use your technology before you talk to anyone else—investors, accelerators, and competitions can wait. If a real industry problem lights up when you describe your idea to a practitioner, you have something worth pursuing; if it does not, it is better to learn that early. And do not wait for the idea to feel ‘startup-ready:’ file that first patent, run that first field trial, and let the market teach you the rest, because I learned far more by doing than I ever did by planning.
AGF: Looking back at your own path, embedded systems engineer, PhD researcher, founder, what's one decision you'd make differently if you were starting over?
MK: If I could change one thing, I would have started building the business side of Saher—market research, investor relationships, business model discipline—earlier and in parallel with the deep technical R&D, rather than treating it as something that comes after the science is ‘done.’ Technology and business have to mature together in deep tech; waiting too long on either one slows down the other.
AGF: For young professionals who are readers of TWA and have similar backgrounds, trying to break into the global energy and tech space, what would you advise them?
MK: Do not assume your background or your geography disqualifies you from playing at the highest level. I built a deep-tech company qualified by the world’s largest energy company out of Saudi Arabia, a place most people do not associate with hardware startups, and it was entirely possible because the fundamentals were sound. Invest deeply in your technical foundation first, then actively seek out exposure to real industry problems as early as you can. And be patient: deep-tech and hardware ventures take years to mature, so build for the long game rather than chasing quick wins.
