Most Emerging Leaders Shaping the Future
The world is being reshaped not by institutions alone, but by individuals. Men and women who saw a gap, built a vision, and had the conviction to pursue it regardless of geography, circumstance, or the weight of conventional wisdom. Across industries, across borders, and across generations, a new class of leaders is emerging and their impact is already being felt.
This edition of The Arab Mashriq brings together five such leaders. They come from different countries, operate in different sectors, and have built their careers through different paths. But they share something important: a refusal to accept the limits of what has always been done, and a commitment to building something that genuinely matters.
From corporate services and energy engineering to artificial intelligence, legal technology, and venture-backed entrepreneurship the leaders featured in these pages represent the full breadth of what modern leadership looks like when it is driven by purpose rather than just profit. Their stories are not simply career highlights. They are blueprints for anyone who believes that the best businesses are built on strong foundations, the right people, and a long-term perspective that outlasts any single transaction or trend.
These are the most emerging leaders shaping the future. And this is where their stories begin.
Vaani Mogaantyy: Strategist of Cross-Border Growth
For many business setup providers, company formation marks the successful completion of an engagement. For Vaani Mogaantyy, it marks the beginning of a much longer partnership. With more than 17 years of experience in the UAE’s corporate services sector, Vaani has guided the establishment of more than 1,000 companies across mainland, free zone, and offshore jurisdictions. Working alongside entrepreneurs, investors, SMEs, and multinational companies has given her a front-row seat to the realities of building a business in one of the world’s most dynamic economies. One lesson has shaped the way she thinks about entrepreneurship: entrepreneurs don’t build companies to obtain licenses they obtain licenses to build businesses. What comes after is what determines whether a business succeeds. That belief became the foundation of everything she built next.
As Founder and Managing Director of ForeRunners Global, Vaani Mogaantyy established a company dedicated to helping entrepreneurs and businesses build the right foundation in the UAE. Through company formation, bank account opening, visa and Golden Visa assistance, tax registration, compliance, and trademark and intellectual property services, ForeRunners Global helps clients enter the market with confidence and clarity. But years of working closely with businesses also revealed that the most important questions arise after incorporation businesses need reliable suppliers, access to buyers, strategic partnerships, and new markets. They need someone who understands not only the regulatory framework for establishing a company, but also the commercial realities of growing one. Rather than ending the relationship once the company was established, Vaani chose to grow alongside her clients. That decision led to the creation of ForeRunners, a Dubai-based global trading company connecting businesses across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. While ForeRunners Global helps businesses establish themselves in the UAE, ForeRunners helps them build commercial relationships, unlock international opportunities, and expand beyond their first market. Together, the two companies reflect a philosophy that is uncommon within the industry one focuses on market entry, the other on market expansion, and together they create continuity for clients at every stage of their business journey.
For businesses, that continuity offers a distinct advantage. Rather than navigating different advisors as their priorities evolve, clients work with a partner who understands the complete picture from regulatory compliance and market entry to commercial growth and international trade. Decisions are made with the next stage of the business in mind, not simply the next transaction. Looking ahead, Vaani Mogaantyy remains focused on strengthening both ForeRunners Global and ForeRunners while expanding their international reach. As businesses increasingly look beyond their domestic markets for growth, she believes success will belong to those who combine strong foundations with the right partnerships and a long-term perspective. For Vaani Mogaantyy, success has never been measured by the number of companies established or transactions completed it is measured by the businesses that continue to grow years after they begin. After helping establish more than 1,000 companies, she remains guided by the same belief that inspired her entrepreneurial journey: company formation is never the destination. It is simply the first step towards building something that lasts.
Emir Isabegovic: From Gothenburg to the Gulf — Building a Global HVDC Engineering Legacy Through Technical Excellence and Independent Expertise
Emir Isabegovic is a power system and HVDC specialist with more than 15 years of international experience across specialist consulting, OEM engineering, owner’s engineering, and transmission planning. His professional foundation was built in Sweden at Gothia Power AB, where he joined in 2009 and later became a partner. Working extensively with ABB HVDC, Emir contributed to major projects including Skagerrak 3+4, DolWin, NordBalt, NordLink, Mackinac, and Troll 3+4 a body of work that established the engineering principles that continue to shape his practice today: technical depth, independent judgement, and the close involvement of senior engineers in project execution. He subsequently worked with DNV before joining Hitachi Energy, where he progressed to Principal Technical Consultant and took technical responsibility across major HVDC developments including IFA2, Dogger Bank, Adani Mumbai, and Project Lightning further cementing his reputation as one of the most experienced and versatile HVDC engineers working internationally.
In 2023, Emir Isabegovic made a defining personal and professional decision, relocating with his family from Sweden to the UAE and stepping fully into the Gulf region’s rapidly expanding energy landscape. At AtkinsRéalis, he worked full-time in Jeddah on major Saudi HVDC projects, gaining direct and ground-level experience of the region’s engineering, project, and business environment. He subsequently joined Sargent & Lundy in Dubai as Transmission Planning Lead and HVDC Specialist, broadening his scope into generation interconnection and wider transmission system studies. This chapter of his career gave Emir Isabegovic something that few engineers of his calibre possess: a genuine combination of deep European HVDC engineering expertise and first-hand experience of the Middle East’s most complex and ambitious power infrastructure projects.
In 2026, Emir Isabegovic founded Titus Power Consulting in the UAE a specialist engineering consultancy built on Swedish engineering roots and Middle Eastern project experience. Titus continues to support selected Sargent & Lundy assignments while building its specialist offering across HVDC, transmission planning, EMT studies, grid integration, grid-code compliance and commissioning support. Through Titus, Emir Isabegovic is bringing together the rigour of Swedish engineering principles, the breadth of his international HVDC experience, and the regional project knowledge he has built since arriving in the Gulf creating a consultancy uniquely positioned to support the complex power system and transmission projects that will define the region’s energy future. From Gothenburg to the Gulf, his journey is one of a specialist who has never stopped pushing the boundaries of what expert independent engineering can deliver.
Bryan Montpetit: Transforming How Organizations Access, Understand, and Act on Their Own Knowledge Through Kübi
Bryan Montpetit is the Founder, Creator, and CEO of Kübi, an AI-powered business knowledge and intelligence platform built around a simple idea: people should be able to instantly leverage what their company already knows. The idea came from a problem Montpetit had encountered repeatedly throughout more than 25 years of building companies, leading international teams, and working across technology, operations, and the language services industry. Companies accumulate enormous amounts of knowledge, but actually finding and using it is another matter. Important information gets fragmented across policies, procedures, contracts, training materials, shared drives, emails, and different systems or simply lives in the head of the one person everyone knows to ask. Montpetit saw this not just as an inconvenience, but as a costly business problem. Kübi was created to make that knowledge immediately useful. Instead of searching through folders or asking around, an employee can simply ask Kübi a question in everyday language and receive an answer based on the company’s own approved knowledge.
Montpetit launched Kübi in 2026, drawing on decades of entrepreneurial and operational experience alongside an extensive background in technology. Over his career, he has founded and grown businesses, led international organizations and teams, developed technology-enabled services, and worked through the practical challenges of scaling companies across different markets. As he moved further into artificial intelligence, he expanded that experience with Agentic AI Development, giving him a deeper understanding of how emerging AI technologies could be applied to real business problems. That background has strongly influenced the way Kübi was built. Montpetit didn’t want to create another place for companies to store documents, or an AI tool that simply generated answers. He wanted to create a trusted layer between employees and company knowledge; one that could help people quickly understand policies, follow procedures, find answers, and work more independently using information the organization already possesses.
But Montpetit’s vision for Kübi goes beyond helping employees find answers. He believes the way people interact with company knowledge can tell leaders an enormous amount about what is actually happening inside their organization. If employees repeatedly ask the same question, there may be a training or communication gap. If documents contradict each other, there may be a governance risk. If certain topics suddenly become common, leadership may be seeing the early signs of an operational issue. Kübi is being built to identify those patterns and transform everyday company knowledge into Business Intelligence leaders can act on. For employees, the value is deliberately simple: ask the company and get the answer. For leaders, Kübi provides something much bigger a clearer view of what their organization knows, what it doesn’t, and where attention may be needed. For Montpetit, that is the real opportunity behind Kübi: companies already possess an extraordinary amount of intelligence. They simply haven’t had an effective way to access, understand, and learn from it.
Stephane Boghossian: Engineering Growth in the AI Era How One Leader Is Putting Legal Intelligence on the Map Across Emerging Markets
Stephane Boghossian is Head of Growth at HAQQ Legal AI, a Beirut-engineered legal technology platform that is redefining how individuals, law firms, universities, and governments access legal intelligence across the Arab world and beyond. In this role, Stephane leads HAQQ’s go-to-market strategy and its AI-search discovery approach — two disciplines that sit at the very frontier of how technology companies build and sustain commercial momentum in an era where the rules of discovery are being rewritten in real time. Previously at Lovable, he brings to HAQQ a sharp understanding of how digital products grow in environments where established playbooks do not always apply and where the ability to move fast and think differently is the defining competitive advantage.
What makes Stephane Boghossian’s work at HAQQ particularly distinctive is his focus on a challenge that most growth leaders have yet to seriously confront: how brands get found not through traditional search, but through the AI assistants and large language models that a growing share of users now turn to first. Roughly a quarter of HAQQ’s traffic already arrives through AI engines an early and telling signal of where discovery is heading across every industry. Stephane is building the strategy, the infrastructure, and the content ecosystem to ensure that when someone anywhere in the world asks an AI assistant for legal help, HAQQ is the answer they receive. It is a go-to-market challenge unlike any that came before it, and one that requires equal parts technical fluency, commercial instinct, and a willingness to build for a future that is still taking shape.
Beyond the platform itself, Stephane Boghossian is a sought-after voice on the topics of AI-search and LLM discovery, emerging-market go-to-market strategy, and growth engineering speaking at industry events and contributing to the broader conversation about how technology companies can compete and win in markets that global players have historically overlooked. His work at HAQQ sits within a mission that is as commercially ambitious as it is socially meaningful: more than five billion people worldwide currently have no meaningful access to legal help, and HAQQ exists to close that gap. As Head of Growth, Stephane Boghossian is the engine behind ensuring that the platform reaches the people, institutions, and communities that need it most making legal intelligence not a privilege of geography or wealth, but a tool available to anyone with a smartphone and a question that deserves a real answer.
Ayman W. Khalil: Building Businesses, Backing Founders, and Proving That Lebanese Talent Can Compete on a Global Stage
Ayman W. Khalil is the Founder and Senior Growth Adviser to the Board of Directors at Vanguard Services S.A.L., a Lebanon-based business services and growth company focused on helping businesses scale through sales execution, outsourcing, and strategic partnerships. At a young age, Ayman W. Khalil has built his career around entrepreneurship, business development, and creating opportunities across borders demonstrating that ambition, discipline, and the right systems can turn local talent into global capability. Through Vanguard, he has developed partnerships with international technology and business platforms while steadily expanding the company’s reach well beyond Lebanon. His work is grounded in a conviction that runs through everything he does: that Lebanese talent can compete anywhere in the world when given the right structure, the right opportunities, and the confidence to pursue them.
Beyond his work at Vanguard, Ayman W. Khalil is actively building toward a broader and more ambitious vision. He is developing an investment platform focused on backing early-stage founders and connecting Middle Eastern talent with global opportunities a natural extension of the belief in people and possibility that has always defined his approach to business. His participation in VC Lab’s Cohort 22 reflects this next chapter, deepening his understanding of venture capital, early-stage investing, and the ecosystems that allow great companies to emerge from unexpected places. It is a deliberate and forward-looking step from operator to investor from building his own company to helping others build theirs.
Looking ahead, Ayman W. Khalil’s long-term goal is to build institutions that create sustainable value, empower entrepreneurs, and demonstrate that companies founded in the Middle East can have a meaningful and lasting global impact. For Ayman, success has never been defined by personal achievement alone it is measured equally by the opportunities he creates for others, the founders he backs, and the talent he helps bring onto the world stage. Whether scaling a business, forging a cross-border partnership, or writing the first cheque into an ambitious early-stage venture, his purpose remains the same: to build something that matters, and to bring others forward with him.
CONCLUSION
What unites the five leaders featured in this edition is not a shared industry or a shared background. It is a shared orientation toward the future, toward people, and toward building things that last beyond the moment in which they were created.
Vaani Mogaantyy has redefined what business setup support can look like when it extends beyond the transaction and into the full arc of a company’s growth. Emir Isabegovic has carried decades of European engineering excellence into the Gulf’s most ambitious energy infrastructure projects, building a consultancy rooted in independence and technical depth. Bryan Montpetit is unlocking the intelligence that already exists inside organisations, turning fragmented knowledge into a strategic asset. Stephane Boghossian is engineering discovery in an era where the rules of how products and platforms get found are being rewritten in real time. And Ayman W. Khalil is turning entrepreneurial conviction into institutional impact backing founders, creating opportunities, and proving that talent from the Middle East can compete and win on a global stage.
Together, their stories make one thing clear: the leaders who will shape the next decade are not waiting for permission. They are building, adapting, and moving forward with clarity of purpose, strength of character, and the kind of long-term thinking that turns ambition into legacy.
At The Arab Mashriq, we are proud to tell their stories.
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