11 Muslim Tech Founders Shaping Our Future
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During the Islamic Golden Age, Muslim innovators such as Al-Khwarizmi, Al-Zahrawi, and Avicenna pioneered breakthroughs in mathematics, medicine, and philosophy that laid the foundations for modern science. Muslim-led advances in fields such as algebra, surgery and optics revolutionised their fields and influenced cultures far beyond their time. Al-Khwarizmi once said, “there is no problem without a solution; it is the process of finding it that makes us stronger and wiser.” Today, a new up-and-coming generation of Muslim masterminds is making waves by doing just that, though not in the libraries of Baghdad or the courts of Andalucía, but in the world of technology.
At Cur8 Capital, we seek to invest in start-ups that have the potential to revolutionise the field they operate in and provide innovative solutions to real-world problems. To see some of our current investments click here, or to learn more about our startup investments and EIS platform from Cur8 Co-Founder & CEO Ibrahim Khan and Principal Uzair Ali, sign up for our free webinar here.
Whilst we’ve focussed on company CEOs to avoid repetition in our list, it is of paramount importance to recognise how crucial a strong founding team is in a startup’s success. Hence, we’ve included company co-founders in each applicable section so you can research their stories too.
So take a look below at a pick of 11 Muslim founders whose innovations are shaping our future, whether it be with GenAI, Medtech or Fintech. Could we be witnessing a renaissance of Muslim ingenuity in the digital age?
August 27 2024 11:00 – 12:00 BST on Microsoft Teams
Onfido co-founders: Eamon Jubbawy and Ruhul Amin
Studying Economics and Management at the University of Oxford, Kassai was also President of Oxford Entrepreneurs during his time as a student. It was at Oxford where the idea for Onfido took root, a tech company leverages artificial intelligence to verify customer identities and prevent fraud. After securing an initial £20,000 investment through the Oxford Seed Fund, Kassai went on to grow, and then sell the start-up to Entrust Corp (a data security firm) for over $400 million. This gave Oxford University a historic 320x return on their investment, with Onfido’s acquisition remaining one of the largest UK tech exits in recent years.
After the Onfido exit, the Cur8-backed founder is now CEO at new startup Quench.ai. The platform acts as an ‘AI training partner’ to empower smarter work, learning and productivity. Quench’s AI supercoach helps organisations to effectively navigate the profound changes seen in traditional career paths, with the platform transforming expert knowledge into tailored learning experiences. The company is backed by Notion, has featured in a range of publications, and has raised $5 million in their pre-seed funding round due to the strength of their tech and management team.
Born in Germany to a Bangladeshi father and a German mother, Karim’s family had to relocate on numerous occasions due to incidents of xenophobia. Eventually moving to the United States and meeting co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, Karim helped launch YouTube in 2005.
He uploaded the first ever YouTube video in April 2005, titled ‘Me at the zoo’, a 19 second clip which has amassed over 330 million views. Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006, with Karim’s shares being worth around $64 million. Today, around 3.7 million videos are uploaded to the platform each day, with over 2.5 billion active users consuming content from the site.
Though keeping his personal life extremely quiet, he has since launched his own venture capital firm called Y Ventures (formerly Youniversity Ventures), and was an early investor in Reddit, Airbnb and Eventbrite.
Livelink co-founders: Imdad Ahad and Mujavid Bukhari
Backed by Cur8 Capital, Ismail is the co-founder and CEO at LiveLink, an AI video editing platform that lets you turn long form content into short clips ready for the likes of Instagram Reels and Tiktok with ease. Having worked with over 70,000 creators globally, LiveLink has raised $3m from Google, Biz Stone (co-founder of Twitter and Medium), and a host of angel investors. Podcast creator Jamie Pearsons has described it as simple, easy to use, and ‘the best tool out there’ for people creating social media clips.
Ismail’s entrepreneurial spirit blossomed early; while a student he launched his first business, Satifs, which helped raise over $1million for charity and funded his tuition fees. Ismail has been recognised for his work and achievements on a variety of platforms including Buzzfeed, BBC, Vice News, Techcrunch, and Forbes. He’s also been ranked as one of the ‘coolest people in tech’ by Business Insider and featured in the Top 100 BAME Leaders in Tech by the Financial Times. In short, in the world of startups, he’s definitely one to watch.
During a taxi ride in New York, a Bangladeshi taxi driver spoke of his troubles investing as a Muslim, with issues of shariah-compliance and riba (interest) playing on his mind. It was this conversation which sparked the idea for Wahed, and pushed Junaid Wahedna to leave Wall Street and revolutionise Islamic finance forever.
Fast forward 9 years and Wahed now harbours a 300,000 strong community, operating in 130 countries with offices in New York, London and the UAE, amongst other locations. With a vision to ‘create a world free from Riba’, Wahed offers ethical, shariah-compliant investments for its users. Investment options include halal global stocks, emerging-market stocks, sukuk and gold.
The company has been valued at over $300 million and has been backed by high-profile Muslim athletes Paul Pogba and Khabib Nurmagomedov.
Pelago Health co-founders: Maroof Ahmed and Sarim Siddiqui
Cur8-backed founder Yusuf Sherwani is a qualified Bachelor of Surgery, studying at Imperial College London and working with the NHS as Clinical Entrepreneur Fellow. Meeting co-founders Maroof Ahmed and Sarim Siddiqui at medical school, the trio would go on to launch Quit Genius (later renamed to Pelago) to combat rapidly rising healthcare costs and ineffective treatment in the field of substance-use care.
Backed by clinical trials, the digital health company works to help individuals overcome substance addition via the medium of a virtual clinic. Pelago offers a comprehensive digital therapeutics platform that combines behavioural therapy, digital tools, and personalised coaching to help individuals quit smoking, alcohol, and opioids.
It’s been a success story so far, with Sherwani stating that users are 5x more likely to quit smoking within a year of using Pelago as opposed to other platforms. Since its Series B funding round, Pelago has seen an incredible 11x revenue turnover and boasts a 100% client retention rate, with investors including Atomico, Y Combinator and Octopus Ventures.
A high achiever from young, Younas was awarded the ‘Kilburn Medal’ for receiving the highest final Computer Science degree mark at the University of Manchester. After graduating, Younas would go on to work as a trader at Morgan Stanley for 9 years before founding Muzz in 2014.
Now a household name, Muzz is the leading Muslim marriage app with over 10 million users on the platform. Bringing more than 500 happy Muslim couples together every day with over 500,000 success stories worldwide, Muzz has been featured in the Financial Times, GQ and Al Jazeera. With a Luxor Capital and Y Combinator led Series A funding round, Muzz continues to grow its team and user base. The app has also grown beyond just a ‘marriage app’, allowing users to now find women-only and men-only groups to foster new friendships.
Modanisa co-founder: Lale Tuzun | Salam Booking co-founder: Dinçer Özkaya
Türe’s desire to solve modern problems for Muslims through entrepreneurship has manifested itself through his business endeavours. Speaking on the Muslim Money Experts Podcast, Türe explains the business model for Modanisa, stating that “every woman has the right to look their best without compromising their beliefs – we provide that”. The modern fashion retailer is now the market leader in the $200 billion industry, with a presence in 130 countries and 85% of its revenue coming from international sales.
In similar fashion, Salam Booking caters to the needs of Muslim travellers, with halal tour-packages, family-friendly hotels and Hajj & Umrah programmes. With a motto of ‘Muslim-friendly travel made easy’, the site provides a blog section covering topics such as ‘Halal Honeymoon’ destinations, visa-free tours and country-specific guides. Unsurprisingly, Türe has been listed in the Top 50 Leaders of Global Islamic Economy in the 2020 edition of Islamica 500 for his entrepreneurial successes.
Nsave co-founder: Abdallah AbuHashem
Awarded the Rhodes Scholarship at the University of Oxford, Baroudi was also the founding President of the Oxford Syria Society during his time as a student. He is now the founder and CEO of nsave, a platform he founded in 2022 after his family lost their life savings to a currency crash. While fleeing the war in Syria, his family were unable to open bank accounts in other countries, being rejected for being too risky. Noticing that offshore banking had been limited to a small bunch of either wealthy or well-connected people, Baroudi set out to democratise its access to everybody else.
Through nsave, Baroudi continues to provide trusted accounts to people from countries where inflation is high and banking is broken. With a team experienced in banking, regulatory compliance, and fintech, nsave has been backed by investors such as Y-Combinator, Sequoia and TQ Ventures.
Careem co-founder: Magnus Olsson
Raised in Karachi, Pakistan, Sheikha completed his higher education in the United States, with degrees from the University of Southern California and Stanford. Working initially in Silicon Valley, he moved back to Pakistan where he co-founded cloud-based platform DeviceAnywhere, which was later acquired by Keynote Systems. He then went on to work as a consultant with McKinsey & Company in Dubai, where he met his future co-founder Magnus Olsson. The pair left their jobs with plans to build a business with meaningful impact, and hence began their plans for Careem.
The company started in 2012 as a website-based service for corporate car bookings, and has since evolved into a Dubai-based super app with operations in over 100 cities, covering 10 countries across the MENA and South Asian regions. Aiming to build an ‘everything app,’ Careem seeks to simplify transport, ordering food and groceries, payment transactions and more. Having helped simplify the lives of over 50 million customers to date, Careem is the biggest unicorn startup company in the Middle East and the leading technology platform in the region. The company was acquired by Uber in 2019 in the largest industry transaction in the Middle East for a figure of $3.1 billion.
Applied Intuition co-founder: Peter Ludwig
A licensed pilot, MBA graduate, and serial entrepreneur, Qasar Younis is a founder currently making waves in the world of autonomous vehicles. Born on a farm in Pakistan, Younis emigrated to the United States and studied Engineering at Kettering University, and later completed an MBA at Harvard Business School. Though his first company Cameesa had many failures, he learnt from these when launching the next. His second startup, TalkBin, allowed customers to send immediate feedback to local businesses, and was acquired by Google less than five months after launch. Younis then joined Google himself and worked in the product department for Google Maps.
His next step took him to Y Combinator, where he quickly rose from part-time partner, to partner, and eventually to COO under Sam Altman’s presidential tenure. He now sits as CEO at Applied Intuition, a company he founded in 2017 alongside Peter Luwig. The company provides a development platform which allows engineering teams to safely develop and test “advanced driver-assistance systems and automated driving systems at scale”. With 18 of the top 20 global automakers already using Applied Intuition’s platform, the company has raised $250 million in its Series E round and has won a valuation of $6 billion.
Co-founders: Firdavs Mirzoev and Zuhursho Rahmatulloev
With credentials in banking, finance, and consulting, Kurbanov is a repeat founder that has revolutionised Islamic fintech in Central Asia. Although he’s worked and studied abroad, Kurbanov claimed on the IFG podcast that he ‘always wanted to go back’ to Tajikistan, and that his time spent outside of Tajikistan both learning and working was all to prepare himself to go eventually back.
Co-founding Somon.tj in 2012, Kurbanov helped create a classified ads company to help digitise an inefficient and fragmented advertising system. With the help of his team and co-founders, the platform is now the most popular homegrown website in Tajikistan. More recently, Kurbanov has started and grown Tajikistan’s first Islamic bank, Alif, which was voted as the most trusted bank in 2021. Alif operates in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, serving close to 2 million clients through the Alif Shop (the largest B2C marketplace in Tajikistan) and other financial services.
In 2023, Kurbanov founded Ayan Capital, a UK-based Islamic car finance platform that offers Shariah-compliant vehicle financing, specifically catering to business, private hire vehicle, and public carriage office drivers across the UK. It has been rated as a top-3 Islamic Finance Startup in the UK and continues to grow its customer base.
From just these 11 founders alone, it’s incredible to see the real-world impact that startups can have spanning a wide range of sectors. You can also check out our podcast interviews with Abdullo Kurbanov and Shahzad Younas on the IFG channel. As these innovators of today work to solve problems in their respective fields, it’s clear that the entrepreneurial spirit within the Muslim community is a driving force in paving the way for a brighter and more advanced tomorrow.
Join us for an exclusive EIS Fund Webinar on August 27 2024, from 11:00 to 12:00 BST, hosted by Cur8 Capital. Hear directly from Cur8 Co-Founder & CEO Ibrahim Khan and Principal Uzair Ali as they share insights into our EIS platform and current investment opportunities. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn more—sign up for our free webinar today.
August 27 2024 11:00 – 12:00 BST on Microsoft Teams
Kerim Ture interview : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsRahiWM1Dc&t=175s
Shahzad Younas IFG interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6lHub61ivk
Abdullo Kurbanov IFG interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=GNzXflC9XwM
https://www.appliedintuition.com/
