Rayan
Khnaisser

Rayan Khnaisser is the Head of Business Transformation, responsible for leading large-scale, multi-stakeholder transformation programs for clients across the public and private sectors. Drawing on over 12 years of experience in strategy consulting and digital transformation, Rayan supports APCO clients across multiple sectors to align strategy with execution and navigate complex change.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

Before joining APCO, Rayan was a director at Smarkk and a Manager at Strategy&, global management consulting firms where he led high-impact strategy engagements that accelerated growth, optimized operations and drove organization and sector-wide transformations. Earlier in his career, he served as head of solutions and PMO at Pearson Education in the Middle East, delivering large-scale digital learning and transformation projects that reached over 100,000 learners across multiple countries.

Based in Dubai, Rayan is active in the MENA venture capital and entrepreneurial ecosystem. He serves as a venture partner at Iliad Partners and as a board member at Diglossia, an edtech company dedicated to enhancing Arabic literacy through standards-based assessments. He holds an MBA from London Business School and a B.E. in Computer and Communication Engineering from Notre Dame University. Rayan’s recharge ritual is a long-distance run, strength training and a steady diet of history, philosophy and business.