Sultan Alkhayal

Founder & CEO

Sultan Alkhayal serves as Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Drahim, a leading Saudi fintech company headquartered in Riyadh and specialised in personal-budget management and automated investment advisory. Drahim operates under licences from the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA) for open-banking services and from the Capital Market Authority for robo-advisory services, and its enrichment engine has processed more than 2.5 billion transactions to analyse user spending and saving behaviour. Alkhayal founded Drahim in August 2021 with co-founder Yasser Al-Sharihi, in alignment with the Financial Sector Development Program of Saudi Vision 2030. In 2022, the company secured a 500,000-US-dollar seed round led by Y Combinator (batch S22) as the first Saudi company to join the accelerator, with participation from 500 Global. In September 2024, Al Rajhi Bank announced the acquisition of a majority 65% stake in Drahim, considered one of the most prominent fintech deals in the region. Before Drahim, Alkhayal worked at Banque Saudi Fransi and at the cybersecurity firm SECURE17SA, and founded a software development agency that built products for more than 20 enterprise customers. Alkhayal is a certified cybersecurity professional and has completed entrepreneurship programmes at Stanford University and Babson College in the United States. He is the only Saudi developer to have been awarded an Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) scholarship in 2016, where he met CEO Tim Cook and Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi. He has previously served as President of the Saudi TechBench community and is regarded as one of the most influential young Saudi voices in fintech and tech entrepreneurship.