Author: Mohammed Abubakr

For many university students, graduation marks the beginning of a difficult paradox. They have spent years acquiring knowledge, earned the degree that employers ask for, and completed the assignments and examinations that prove they can learn. Yet when they begin applying for jobs, they are often told they lack the one thing they cannot acquire inside a classroom: experience. For Miqdad Hassan, Founder and CEO of CareerDC, this problem became personal long before it became a business opportunity. In 2011, while living in Sydney, Hassan met an international student from Bangladesh who had strong academic qualifications but was struggling to…

For most people, the arrival of ChatGPT in early 2023 was an introduction to a new kind of technology. For Arushad Ahmed, it exposed a problem that had been quietly sitting underneath the AI revolution: what happens when the language you speak is not one of the languages the technology understands well? That question would lead Ahmed, co-founder and CTO of Maldivian software company Javaabu, to build DhivehiGPT, an AI platform designed specifically around Dhivehi, the language spoken in the Maldives. What started as a weekend experiment in his dorm room at the University of St Andrews has grown into…

For more than a decade, messaging apps have trained billions of people to communicate in essentially the same way: open a group, send a message, scroll through hundreds of replies, search for something you remember seeing three months ago, and hope nobody missed an important update. WhatsApp made group communication remarkably simple. Telegram expanded what communities could do with larger groups, channels and bots. But as artificial intelligence moves from answering questions to actually performing tasks, Riza Herzego believes messaging needs to evolve again.  Herzego, an Indonesian product leader and entrepreneur, is building Binder, a messaging platform designed not only…

The Personal Question Behind a Pan-African Ambition The idea for NylaBank did not begin with a spreadsheet, a market report or a venture capital pitch deck. It began with a conversation at home. After exiting his first technology company and taking time to recover from years of startup stress and burnout, Mubarak Sumaila visited his mother. During a conversation about money, she explained why she and others in her community hesitated to use conventional banks. The problem, he discovered, was not simply access to financial services. Banks were available, but many of the products and practices behind them did not…

How Asif Syed Is Building Alfafaa Community Into the Digital Infrastructure of the Ummah For most technology founders, the origin story begins with a market gap, a technical breakthrough or a business opportunity. For Asif Syed, the founder of Alfafaa Community, the journey began with a much more personal question: what should one do with a second chance at life? At 16, Syed was diagnosed with Stage IV lymphoma and underwent roughly two years of chemotherapy. The experience reshaped his sense of purpose, even as his fascination with technology continued to grow from childhood experiments with an old IBM computer.…

From the Pentagon and Google to a 5 A.M. Cessna At five o’clock in the morning, standing beside a Cessna and preparing for a flight, Almeena Shaikh found herself doing what many general aviation pilots have learned to accept as routine. She was moving between multiple apps, checking weather, regulations, aircraft information and other pieces of data required before taking off. The problem was not a shortage of information. The problem was that none of those tools appeared to understand the person making the decision. None of them knew her recency as a pilot, the aircraft she was flying, her…

On a work trip to Austin, Zakir H. was looking for something simple: a way to meet other Muslims and discover community events. He searched through Eventbrite, hoping to find gatherings that would help him connect with people in a new city. Later that night, however, an email recommendation arrived with a very different suggestion: “Nightlife in Austin.” For Zakir, the experience was more than an irrelevant recommendation. It raised a much deeper question about what happens when people searching for meaningful community experiences are placed inside digital platforms whose discovery engines are designed around entirely different assumptions. His immediate…

From Student Leadership to Reinventing Payments The idea behind Kanam Pay began with a problem that sounds almost trivial: a ticket, a payment, a phone that is suddenly unavailable. But for Aarif Mohamed Konnon Tiama, Co-Founder and CEO of Kanam Pay, those moments exposed something much larger about the way financial services work in Africa. If access to money depends entirely on a device, what happens when that device is lost, stolen, broken or simply out of battery? Tiama’s answer is increasingly ambitious: what if your face could become the key to accessing your money? Today, Kanam Pay is building…

From Software to the Physical World For nearly two decades, Shamoon Siddiqui built software companies. He founded and worked across ventures including BookSwim, CryptoStreet and Trilogy Education, spending much of his career in a world where products could be designed, tested and shipped primarily through code. But as artificial intelligence accelerated software development, Siddiqui began to question where the next durable opportunities would exist. If a small team could now build software in weeks that once required years and large engineering organizations, he became increasingly convinced that the harder problems would be found somewhere else: in the physical world. Construction…

From Investor to Founder For Nurmukhammad Ismoilov, the origins of entrepreneurship did not begin with a startup idea. They began with years of investing, learning how markets work, and discovering that financial decisions are ultimately less forgiving than the stories people tell about them. After eight years in the market, one lesson stayed with him: narratives are cheap, but numbers decide whether an investment actually works. That mindset would eventually shape Akinda, a fintech platform designed to help Muslim investors determine whether companies are Shariah-compliant and, importantly, understand the reasoning behind those decisions. But Akinda did not begin as a…