At an age when most people are still finishing their studies, Nour Idelbi had already founded a company, won a prize from the German President, and appeared on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. Her journey began not in a boardroom but in a youth council in her hometown of Münster, where a personal sense of insecurity turned into the idea for Safe Space, an app designed to help women and young people navigate their cities more safely.
In a wide-ranging conversation, Idelbi looked back on how that early experience shaped her understanding of technology, security, and leadership, and reflected on what she has learned since, from data privacy to scaling a startup across borders, and from the ethics of AI to her advice for a new generation of founders.
From the Youth Council to Safe Space
Idelbi’s engagement with public life started early. “I started with 13 in politics,” she recalled, describing her time in the Jugendrat, Münster’s youth council, where she was eventually elected to represent around thirty young people. Among the issues she cared about most was the safety of children and women. When she realized that neither the government nor her own city were doing enough about it, she decided to act herself. Without any coding experience, she gathered a group of fellow Gen Z peers and began building what would become Safe Space.
For Idelbi, the link between individual security and broader empowerment is direct. Before building the app, she says, she did not feel safe in her own city. Working on Safe Space did not immediately change that, but it made her feel “more empowered” and “seen.” That shift, she argues, eventually opened the door to bigger ambitions: further startups, her first venture capital funding, and a place on the Forbes list. “It all needed to start with one small problem that is actually a really big problem in society,” she said, describing it as a pattern that scales from individuals to entire countries.
Privacy in an Age of Surveillance
Building a location-based safety app inevitably means handling sensitive personal data, a responsibility Idelbi says her small team took seriously from the start, partly on the advice of the developers who built the product. “Let’s think about this, let’s implement that,” she recalled them saying, even though stronger privacy protections meant more time, more difficulty and higher costs. Scaled up to a societal level, she believes the same logic applies to institutions: data privacy problems are solvable, but only if someone at the top genuinely makes it their mission, something she suspects happens less often than it should.
Asked whether civic safety apps could evolve into formal partners for governments and international organizations during crises, Idelbi pointed to a broader pattern. In moments of crisis, she argued, institutions tend to turn to whoever has made a given problem their life’s focus, citing how experts are mobilised quickly after events like hurricanes. Whether such partnerships are the optimal solution, she admits she cannot say for certain, but she sees them as a natural development.
Empowering the Next Generation of Women Leaders
Having started her first company at sixteen, Idelbi is used to being underestimated. Asked what systemic changes could open better pathways for young women in tech and policy, she emphasised exposure over policy design: “We need to talk more about the projects you can do and the influence you as an individual can have very early on.” She credits mentors who pointed her toward opportunities such as Startup Teens, a German competition that gave her the funding to develop her first idea at sixteen. That experience, she says, is why she later became a business angel in a startup focused on expanding opportunities for young people.
Expanding a security-focused platform across different regulatory environments, Idelbi says, follows the same logic as scaling any company: sometimes it means opening regional chapters that adapt to local rules, and sometimes a single hub can serve multiple markets at once. She notes that technology has made this easier for her generation of founders than it was for companies that had to scale manually a decade or two ago, though the difficulty still depends heavily on the industry and region involved.
Artificial Intelligence and the Limits of Automation
On the growing role of AI in areas like predictive policing and automated emergency response, Idelbi’s position is cautiously optimistic: existing tools should be used as long as they do not compromise data privacy, though she stresses that the answer also depends on which country, and which technology, is involved. She acknowledges her own position as a founder colours her view. “A founder will always say that,” she said, noting that the risk of being replaced by automation looks very different from the top of a company than it does further down.
Choosing the Private Sector
Having worked with major political figures in Germany and tried both politics and entrepreneurship, Idelbi is candid about where she believes the greatest impact lies: building. In politics, she argues, one first needs to be given the right to act, through election or appointment, while entrepreneurship allows a founder to simply start. “You take the right, and then you change the world if you do it the right way,” she said, pointing to companies like Apple as examples of ventures that reshaped the world once they existed.
Idelbi’s closing advice was simple: start small, hold on to a big vision, and do the unglamorous work in between. Building something, she said, means searching for collaborators, sketching a first design, testing, and then spending months or years on the less exciting parts, marketing, outreach, and iteration, before any results appear. For a generation she describes as shaped by short attention spans and instant gratification, her message was blunt: “Just do it, don’t overthink it, and have patience.”
About the interviewed: Nour Idelbi is a German entrepreneur born in Dubai and raised in Münster. At sixteen, she founded Safe Space, a safety app for women and young people that uses a status system to signal when a user feels unsafe and to alert their community or emergency contacts. The project was developed in close collaboration with the German Federal Police and was later honoured by the German President and federal ministries. Idelbi has since gone on to co-found a consumer startup in the beverage space, which secured close to a million euros in pre-seed funding from a major European venture capital firm, and she now sits on the boards of several international companies spanning the media and consumer sectors. She was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list and is also active as a business angel, backing startups focused on expanding opportunities for young people.
