Abdulsalam Haykal
Executive Chairman, Majarra
Abdulsalam Haykal is an entrepreneur and investor focused on transforming the Arabic web
by making knowledge and information, otherwise unavailable in Arabic, accessible to most
Arabic-speaking communities in the region. He continues a family business legacy that goes
back to 1939.
Abdulsalam is the founder and executive chairman of Majarra, the region’s leading provider
of premium digital knowledge and information platforms in Arabic, with several flagship
products, including the Arabic editions of Harvard Business Review, MIT Technology Review,
Stanford Social Innovation Review, Popular Science, Fortune, and Psychologies. Majarra
also produces Manhom, the largest directory of individuals and companies in the Arabic
language.
Abdulsalam is a founder and board member of Transtek Systems, an enterprise software
systems company with market-leading products for fixed assets, inventory, maintenance,
and AML. He is also the founder and chairman of Lableb, an Arabic-natural language
processing (NLP)company, whose products include AI-based enterprise and in-site search
and consumer search.
Abdulsalam Haykal serves on the Board of Trustees of the American University of Beirut,
and on the UAE’s Arabic Language Advisory Council, and the Advisory Board of the Center
on AI and Humanities at New York University Abu Dhabi. He was named a Young Global
Leader by the World Economic Forum and received the Arab Thought Foundation’s Media
Innovation Award, and the Medal of the American University of Beirut Alumni Association -
Lebanon.
He is a graduate of the American University of Beirut and SOAS, University of London, and
the executive programs at Harvard Kennedy School and Yale University.