AI Investor · Executive Advisor · Senior Executive
Three decades
at the edge of
Strategy, High-Tech and AI.
From Deep-Tech Engineer and AI Entrepreneur, to McKinsey Consultant and regional Senior Executive, to AI Investor and Executive Advisor today.
I have spent my career in roles where the existing playbook was never quite enough — sometimes because none yet existed, sometimes because the one in hand had to be challenged outright or reinvented.
I started with an MSc in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, with a dissertation in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision. My early career was in mission-critical, deep-tech system development, including work on a speech-enabled radar interface project applied at the technical frontier of what could be built at the time.
I co-founded and led a venture-capital-backed AI startup in San Francisco and Belgium, focused on speech recognition. Turning research-grade AI capability into production-grade reliability before any operating template existed.
At McKinsey & Company in the Strategy & Corporate Finance practice, I led management consulting engagements in M&A and corporate finance, large-scale transformation programmes, and radical operational excellence work including LEAN-driven step-changes. Clients included multinational companies, family-owned conglomerates and public sector organisations in Europe, MENA and Asia.
The seventeen years that followed took me to the Middle East and Africa in C-suite roles at LG Electronics and Royal Philips. These are volatile markets characterised by chaotic regulatory shifts, sovereign-led transformation, and the kind of operating context where the global headquarters approach needs substantial regional adaptation. The work I led there spanned regional strategy, business modeling and go-to-market reinvention, new business building, innovation management, leading the healthcare consulting practice, transforming the regional solutions business, and growing the B2G practice.
Inside complex organisations, the journey from Strategy to Impact gets throttled across three challenging areas: strategy & transformation, business development, and venture building. Strategies need to be crafted with both ambition and realism, then carried through to transformation and adoption, yet most get shelved instead. Building new revenue lines requires its own discipline across business models, partnerships, and channels. New ventures designed inside the gravity of the mothership rarely escape it. AI compounds the difficulty across all three: it speeds up what works, exposes what does not, and brings its own adoption challenges at the individual, team, and organisational levels.
On the other end of the spectrum, AI startups in the Middle East face their own set of headwinds. The region is uniquely positioned to contribute to and capture AI value: sovereign-aligned capital, government and enterprise buyers committing real budgets, a new generation of AI-Native founders. But founders still struggle to raise smart money, the AI and venture ecosystems around them are still nascent, and adoption at scale remains the bottleneck.
My work today plays out across three fronts. Each addresses a different lever on how AI value gets made and captured in volatile markets: the founders who build it, the leaders who deploy it, and the conversation that shapes what comes next.
For Nexan Ventures, please visit nexan.vc .
