About us
A boutique firm for a regulated era.
Novara Strategies advises emerging companies and established organizations on the policies, frameworks, and governance practices that make AI and data systems defensible — to regulators, to investors, and to the public.
Our Mission
Novara Strategies is a boutique tech policy firm helping startups, advocacy groups, and mission-driven organizations navigate AI governance, data privacy, and regulatory strategy. We exist at the intersection of law, innovation, and public impact.
Novara’s Purpose
The rules governing technology are being written right now. The organizations that understand them early will build with confidence. The ones that do not will spend years catching up.
Novara Strategies was founded to close that gap. We help future-facing teams understand what the regulatory landscape actually requires, where their real risks live, and how to build governance structures that hold up under scrutiny from investors, regulators, and the communities they serve.
We work with founders who are moving fast and need someone who can keep up. With advocacy groups navigating complex policy environments. With organizations that believe responsible innovation and ambitious growth are not in conflict.
We do not simply advise. We partner. Every engagement is founder-led, deeply researched, and built around your specific situation.
Principles
I
Founder-led, always.
Every engagement is conducted directly by our founder. No junior staff, no hand-offs, no diluted thinking.
II
Plain-language counsel.
Regulatory expectations translated into language your engineers, board, and customers can act on.
III
Built before it's required.
We design governance you'll be glad to have when investors, regulators, or stakeholders require answers.
What Makes Us Different
• Expertise in AI, data governance, and regulatory design
• Legal literacy grounded in Ivy League education
• Experience across tech, nonprofit, healthcare, and advisory sectors
Meet our Founder
Riham Hashi
Founder & CEORiham's path to founding Novara Strategies spans nearly a decade of policy work across sectors, borders, and communities. She began her career on Capitol Hill and has since built an unusually broad foundation across the public, nonprofit, and private sectors, in the United States and internationally.
Her work has taken her from legislative strategy and government affairs in Washington to international humanitarian and development work with organizations including Project Hope, with experience living and working in Panama, Kenya, and South Korea. She has also led community capacity building and policy work at the local and state level across the United States, giving her a rare ground-level perspective on how policy decisions shape communities in practice, not just in theory.
Her professional background includes direct experience in AI governance, data privacy, advocacy, and public affairs. She approaches every engagement with the belief that good governance is not just a compliance exercise. It is a public responsibility.
Riham is completing her law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and holds a degree in public policy and international affairs from American University. Her academic work spans AI and implicit bias, IP and tech law, corporate and business law, entrepreneurial law, and regulatory strategy.
She founded Novara Strategies because she saw a gap between the pace of innovation and the capacity of organizations to govern it responsibly. Novara exists to close that gap.
Riham works directly with every client. No hand-offs, no junior staff. If you work with Novara, you work with Riham.
“I built Novara Strategies because I believe the organizations shaping technology should also be shaping the standards it is held to. That work starts with getting governance right from the beginning.”