Author: Mohammed Abubakr

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…

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.…