Author: Mohammed Abubakr

When Khansa Khatoon began wearing hijab, she expected the change to be personal. What she did not expect was how difficult it would be to find a style that felt both modest and fashionable. Living in Dallas, she watched women around her put together polished outfits but struggled to achieve the same look herself. The experience eventually led her to a question that would shape her next chapter: why was there no styling app built around the needs of women like her? Today, Khatoon is building ALIFF, an AI-powered styling app designed to help Muslim women create outfits from clothes…

A home improvement project should not take weeks of unanswered calls, failed promises and unexpected costs. Yet for many homeowners, finding someone reliable to fix a door, repair a leak or renovate a room can become a frustrating experience. Yunus Kazan, founder of Helperow, knows this problem firsthand. What began as a small project in his own home eventually led him to build a technology platform designed to change how people find, hire and work with home service professionals. The idea emerged when Kazan and his wife wanted to add a door to their hallway to create a private guest…

Most businesses have plenty of data. They can track sales, monitor operations and review reports to understand what went right or wrong. The harder question is whether that information can help them see a problem coming and do something about it before it affects the business. Ahmad Hijazi, co-founder of Lensiq, believes this is where the next major shift in business technology will happen. Lensiq is developing a predictive intelligence platform that combines historical data with real-time information to help companies anticipate outcomes and make better decisions. Its first area of focus is logistics, where delivery delays, route disruptions and…

Alperen Asım Akbaş Wants to Change How the World Thinks About Recycled Materials For years, sustainability in architecture and interior design has often been treated as a trade-off. Designers may want to reduce waste and use recycled materials, but they must also consider appearance, performance, cost and how a material fits into a finished space. Alperen Asım Akbaş, founder of Born Material, believes recycled materials should not have to compromise on design. His company transforms post-industrial and consumer polystyrene waste into premium surfaces for furniture, interiors, lighting and product design. The aim is to create materials that people choose not…

The founder of Talosec wants to turn cybersecurity expertise into a lasting African capability, combining technical security services, threat intelligence and professional training to help organizations defend themselves in an increasingly digital world. When a business discovers a security vulnerability, the immediate question is often how to fix it. But for Abdiwahab Ahmed, the founder and CEO of Talosec, the more important question is what happens when that vulnerability becomes part of a much larger failure. A weakness in an application might expose sensitive information. A compromised password could give an attacker access to an entire network. An overlooked cloud…

For Adam Moez Masoud, the problem with many prayer apps is not that they fail to tell Muslims when to pray. It is that knowing when to pray and actually making time for salah are two very different things. That distinction inspired Just Pray, a mobile application designed to help Muslims build consistency in their five daily prayers. Rather than becoming another all-in-one Islamic platform, Masoud wants to solve one problem exceptionally well: helping people make prayer a regular part of their lives. The idea came from personal observation. When Masoud began praying, he noticed how many people around him…

For many Muslims, the desire to deepen their understanding of Islam is not the problem. Finding the time, a qualified teacher and a structured learning programme that fits around the demands of everyday life can be much harder. For families balancing work, school and other responsibilities, regular Islamic education often requires a level of coordination that is difficult to sustain. In Uganda, Huzaifah Lutaaya Idris and his co-founders saw an opportunity to address that challenge through technology. Their venture, iLab, combines live, teacher-led lessons with structured learning pathways and digital progress tracking, allowing students to learn remotely without losing the…

For Umar Munshi, the future of Muslim entrepreneurship will not be determined by how many startups chase billion-dollar valuations. It will depend on how many build businesses that survive difficult markets, solve meaningful problems and create lasting value for their communities. That conviction sits at the heart of HASAN.VC, the venture capital firm he co-founded to connect Muslim entrepreneurs with investors who understand both their markets and their values. Today, a network of 70 angel investors backs 40 portfolio companies across 10 countries, offering founders more than capital. The network also brings customers, mentors, operating experience, and relationships that can…

As Co-Director of The Halal Catering Argentina, Amal is helping a family institution expand its international reach while championing women’s leadership, cross-cultural dialogue and the next generation of Halal professionals. When Amal Khalil Kabalan speaks about Argentina’s agricultural wealth, she recalls a phrase her Lebanese grandfather used to describe the country he had made his home. “We Arabs have black gold, oil; Argentina has green gold: its countryside and fertile land.” The observation became more than a family saying. Her grandfather, a Lebanese Muslim immigrant, recognized that Argentina’s productive capacity could serve Muslim consumers around the world, provided the food…

Muslims make up 63.5% of Malaysia’s population, yet only 20 of the 100 startups in Cradle’s Malaysia Top 100 Startups list have Muslim founders, according to StartupMuslim.com’s research. The findings raise an important question about entrepreneurship, access to capital, and the support available to aspiring Muslim founders. Malaysia has the ingredients to produce a much larger generation of successful entrepreneurs. It has a substantial Muslim population, a growing technology ecosystem, access to regional markets, and government institutions supporting startups. Yet, a review by StartupMuslim.com of Cradle’s Malaysia Top 100 Startups, 2026 Edition, identified just 20 companies with Muslim founders. This…

After three decades building technology businesses, the UQWAH founder is working to connect mosques, entrepreneurs and local communities through a shared digital platform. For Rizanoel Irvin Latif, the next big opportunity in technology may not be another consumer application or enterprise software platform. It may lie in one of Indonesia’s oldest and most trusted community institutions: the mosque. Having spent more than three decades working across information technology, airport systems, digital media and online platforms, Latif has seen how technology can reshape the way people communicate and conduct business. Through UQWAH, his latest venture, he wants to apply that experience…

For more than a decade, Anouar Adham worked inside Islamic banks, institutions created to offer financial services consistent with Islamic principles. Yet the longer he spent in the industry, the more he questioned whether its products delivered a genuinely different outcome for customers. Contracts might change, but the experience often remained familiar: customers took on long-term financial obligations while carrying much of the economic risk themselves. One conversation crystallised the problem. A colleague at one of the bank’s main branches admitted that he could not clearly explain the substantive difference between its Sharia-compliant car financing and a conventional loan. If…

For years, Dilara Sevgili Küçük watched people learn Arabic the way many students learn languages: through grammar, vocabulary lists and textbooks. They could understand written passages and explain grammatical rules, yet when it came time to speak, many would hesitate, translate in their heads or simply freeze. That disconnect became more than an observation. It became the foundation for Arapça Konuşuyoruz, a Turkey-based language education platform built around a simple idea: Arabic should not remain a subject people study. It should become a language they can actually use. Dilara journey to that insight was shaped by an unusual combination of…

For Maryam Khan, venture capital did not begin with a fund. It began with being a founder, a mother and an entrepreneur who experienced firsthand how difficult the earliest stages of building a company can be. For the past decade, Maryam and her husband have been building ventures together while raising their three children, with her husband providing the support that allowed her to pursue work she believes matters. That experience shaped one of her strongest convictions: women should not have to choose between their families and their ambitions. Maryam’s transition from founder to investor came from seeing the same…

For Dr. Alireza Babakhan, venture capital was never supposed to be a departure from engineering. It was an extension of it. His career moved from industrial engineering and technology management into a PhD in Science, Technology and Innovation Policy, then into the world of entrepreneurs, technology companies and investment. Along the way, he kept encountering the same problem: technically strong companies often failed to reach their potential not because their technology was weak, but because something around the technology was missing, whether capital, customers, manufacturing capacity, management expertise or the right strategic partner. Today, as CEO of Alborz Research and…

In the Middle East, air conditioning is not simply an appliance. It is critical infrastructure. Across the Middle East and North Africa, extreme heat and rising temperatures are making cooling one of the biggest drivers of electricity demand. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that cooling already accounts for nearly half of peak electricity demand and about one-quarter of annual electricity demand across MENA. Summer temperatures regularly exceed 40°C, while average temperatures in the region are rising at more than twice the global rate.  The pressure on power systems is only increasing. MENA’s electricity demand tripled between 2000 and 2024,…

It was a way of bringing together two parts of her identity that had spent years developing separately. Born in Mexico with Pakistani roots, Hussain built a professional career across finance, technology, artificial intelligence, digital transformation and business development. Then she found a medium through which those worlds could meet: jewellery. Today, through Nadia Hussain Jewellery, she is bringing 21-karat gold jewellery originating from Multan, Pakistan, to the Mexican market. But the ambition extends beyond selling jewellery. Hussain wants to introduce Mexican consumers to Pakistan’s craftsmanship, history and cultural heritage while demonstrating that luxury can also represent wealth preservation, identity…

More than 1,400 years ago, in the trading city of Makkah, Khadija bint Khuwaylid (RA) was building a life around commerce. She was a successful businesswoman who managed substantial trading interests and employed others to conduct business on her behalf. Among those she entrusted with her trade was a young Muhammad ﷺ, whom she hired to lead one of her caravans to Syria because of his reputation for honesty and trustworthiness. Her story offers an important reminder for a modern Muslim world that sometimes forgets its own history: women participating in economic life, building enterprises, employing others and creating opportunity…

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…