islamic-finance
(7)
The Doctors Building a Fund Around the Waiting Room
Baraka Prosperity Partners is putting clinics, operating platforms and the buildings beneath them into one patient-capital strategy. Its wager is that physicians can underwrite healthcare infrastructure with a perspective conventional finance often misses.
Abyan Capital
Abyan Capital is a Riyadh-based, app-first robo-advisory and savings platform that lets everyday Saudis open an investment account in about three minutes and put money into Sharia-compliant portfolios of sukuk, real estate, and local and international equities. Founded in 2021 and regulated by Saudi Arabia's Capital Market Authority, it was the Kingdom's first robo-advisor and has grown to more than 100,000 funded portfolios and over SAR 1.4 billion in deposits, backed by an $18M Series A led by STV.
Abhi
Abhi is a MENAP embedded-finance company that started by letting salaried workers draw wages they have already earned before payday, and has grown into a full stack of employer-facing tools - earned wage access, payroll processing, payroll financing and invoice factoring - plus its own microfinance bank in Pakistan. Founded in 2021 by Omair Ansari and Ali Ladhubhai and backed by Y Combinator (S21), it now serves over a million people across thousands of companies in Pakistan, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Oman, and was the first MENAP fintech named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer.
Mahaana
Mahaana is Pakistan's first licensed digital wealth manager, a Y Combinator (W22) backed fintech that lets anyone start investing from PKR 1,000 in about ten minutes with no paperwork. Regulated by the SECP as a Non-Banking Financial Company, it offers Shariah-compliant savings, money-market funds, an index ETF and retirement plans through a mobile-first, robo-advisory platform aimed at onboarding Pakistan's largely unbanked, non-investing population.
تعميد | Tameed
Tameed (تعميد) is a Riyadh-based fintech that runs the first Saudi Central Bank-licensed debt crowd-lending platform specialized in purchase-order financing. It connects small and medium enterprises holding government and large-corporate purchase orders with a crowd of individual and institutional investors who fund those orders in return for Sharia-compliant profit. SMEs unlock working capital in as little as three business days, while investors gain access to short-term, asset-backed opportunities that have paid an average annual return in the mid-teens.
IdealRatings
IdealRatings is a San Francisco-based financial data and technology company that helps investors screen and rate securities against ESG, responsible-investment, and Shariah-compliance standards. Founded in 2006, it operates two business lines - ESG & Responsible Investment Solutions and Islamic Finance Solutions - covering a global universe of equities, fixed income, REITs and Sukuk. Its subscription, web-based tools and datasets are licensed by asset managers, banks, brokerages, stock exchanges and index providers in over 25 countries, and power benchmarks including the Bloomberg Shariah Sukuk indices and the FTSE IdealRatings Islamic index series.
Ateeq ur Rahman
Ateeq ur Rahman is a London-based founding partner of Sovereign Stone Capital Partners, a private investment firm backing mid-market businesses across the UK and Southern Europe. After nearly 30 years in international banking, including a stint as Country Head and Managing Director for Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank in Qatar where he led the merger with Union National Bank, he turned operator and investor, building ventures spanning Portuguese real estate, venture capital, and specialty coffee. He commits personal capital to deals and prefers hands-on partnership to passive checks.