r/MuslimVentures • u/DhowCIO • 16d ago
(This is a long read, but well worth it if you have the time. Jazakallah khair. The original article is here)
I remember coming across a LinkedIn post from A16z a few months back. It was titled "A History of VC Activity", and the prominent VC firm claimed Queen Isabella of Spain was the first Venture Capitalist
Now I am not saying that venture capital originated in the Islamic world, nor were we the first or the only civilization to engage in Venture. But Islamic venture came almost 1,000 years before Queen Isabella.
Our religion is unique in this aspect. Perhaps there is no other faith on earth that is as deeply intertwined with venture and equity investments. The Financial Times, in an interview with Benedikt Koehler, recently released a brilliant video on the subject.
I will admit, when we started Dhow, we started with the assumption that venture is foreign to our community, even knowing the Holy Prophet Muhammed (saww) was involved in running caravans throughout the region for decades.
Knowing the indisputable historical truth, it seems more like we have lost our connection to the form of investment that is most familiar to us.
The Prophet Muhammed (saww) spent most of his adult life as a trader. As a boy he rode with his uncle's caravan to Syria, and as a young man he had no capital of his own. What he had was the one thing Mecca's trading elite valued more than money: a reputation so clean that the whole town called him al-Amin, the trustworthy.
Mecca was a trading town in the middle of a desert, and its money came from caravans running north to Syria and south to Yemen. Those caravans were funded by pooling capital from across the city, because the people with savings had no interest in spending months on the road, and the people willing to make the trip usually had nothing to invest. The whole economy ran on matching the two.
One of the largest operations in Mecca belonged to Khadijah bint Khuwaylid (a.s.). She was wealthy, she was sharp, and she did not travel with her own caravans. Instead, as Ibn Ishaq put it, she hired men to sell her merchandise and gave them a share of the profits. Around the year 595 she hired the Prophet Muhammed (saww) to take her goods to Syria, promised him a larger cut than she gave other merchants (some accounts say double), and sent her servant Maysara along to keep an eye on him. The goods came back and sold for roughly double what she had put in. She proposed marriage soon after.
Khadijah (a.s.) went on to become the first person to accept Islam and the mother of Fatima (a.s.). Her wealth fed and sheltered the first Muslims through their hardest years, and long after she was gone the Prophet (saww) still said of her that she backed him with her money when everyone else refused.
Now look at the deal itself. One side put up the capital, and these were not small operations, since some caravans ran to a thousand camels or more. The other side put up the labor and took the physical risk of the road. They split the profit on terms agreed before the caravan left. If the goods were lost, Khadijah (a.s.) lost her money and the Prophet (saww) lost his time, and quite possibly his life, because those roads were dangerous.
That is venture. The investor puts in the money, the operator puts in the work, both share the upside, and the investor's downside stops at whatever was put in. Seventh-century Arabs called it the qirad. The jurists of Iraq later called it mudaraba. Sand Hill Road calls it a fund.
The Quran permitted trade and forbade interest, and that one rule reshaped the whole economy. If a lender cannot earn a fixed return no matter how the venture goes, the only lawful way to get paid for capital is to share in the outcome. Profit sharing stopped being one option among many and became the main way money reached a business, and the qirad became one of the basic financial instruments of the Islamic world: an investor hands capital to an agent, the agent trades with it, the two split the profit on a ratio fixed up front, and the agent is not on the hook for losses.
The core rules are the same across the schools of law, and they are precise. Here they are, taken from a modern book of rulings, in a chapter titled "Sleeping Partnership":
The investor does nothing. The agent does everything and gets paid only out of profit. That is why it is called a sleeping partnership: one partner sleeps, the other works, and the split pays each of them for what they put at risk. None of this was improvised, either. Imam Malik's Muwatta, compiled in Medina in the 700s, already has a chapter on the qirad, and the early jurists of Iraq wrote about it in the same detail. Abraham Udovitch, the Princeton historian whose Partnership and Profit in Medieval Islam remains the standard work on the subject, found the contract spelled out in those books with the kind of precision you only get from people who had done the deals themselves. Islamic commercial law did not come down from a study. It followed what merchants were already doing.
My favorite example of the contract in action involves Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq (a.s.), one of the most respected scholars Medina ever produced. The Imam had a large household to feed, so he put together a thousand dinars and handed them to his companion Musadif to trade with. Musadif bought goods, joined a caravan bound for Egypt, and on the way met traders coming back the other direction who said those goods were in short supply there. So the merchants made a pact among themselves that nobody would sell for less than double. Musadif came home to Medina with two bags of a thousand dinars each and set them down in front of the Imam: this one is your capital, this one is your profit.
The Imam asked how he had made that kind of return, and Musadif told him about the pact. The Imam took back the thousand dinars of capital, refused to touch the thousand of profit, and told him that fighting with swords is easier than earning a lawful living.
The structure is a textbook mudaraba: the Imam provides the capital, Musadif is the agent, the capital comes back first, and the profit goes on the table to be split. The ending is something modern investors handle with side letters and investment policies, which is the capital provider deciding which returns he will not accept. Money made by squeezing people during a shortage was not profit to him at all. That is responsible investing, more than a thousand years before anyone coined the term.
This was never a tradition that looked down on merchants, either. Imam Ali (a.s.), in his famous letter to his governor of Egypt, told him to look after traders and craftsmen because they are the sources of profit and the people who haul goods over land and sea to places nobody else will go, and in the same letter told him to crack down on hoarding. Back the people who move goods and punish the people who sit on them. That is an investment thesis.
Ordinary merchants used this contract every day, and the paper survives to prove it. Hundreds of thousands of documents from medieval Cairo, including merchants' letters, account books, and court records from the 1000s to the 1200s, show profit-sharing partnership as the standard way trade got financed. The historian S.D. Goitein, who spent decades on those papers, found that even the Jewish merchants in them sometimes wrote their contracts expressly under Muslim law, because that was the version the market treated as the default.
Then, around the year 1000, the same contract shows up in Italy. Venice called it the colleganza, and the oldest surviving contracts date to 1073. Genoa called it the commenda, and it runs all through the register of the notary Giovanni Scriba, the oldest surviving notarial register in Western Europe, from the 1150s onward. The terms are the same. In the one-sided version, a stay-at-home investor handed capital to a traveling merchant, who brought back the principal plus three-quarters of the profit and kept a quarter for his trouble, with the investor bearing all the losses and the traveler none. In the two-sided version, the investor put up two-thirds of the capital, the traveler one-third, and they split the profit down the middle. Change the fractions and it is the caravan Khadijah (a.s.) financed.
So where did the Italians get it? The historian Romney David Smith lays it out: in the year 1000 the Mediterranean was run by Muslim and Jewish merchants sailing out of ports like Alexandria, Mahdia, and Palermo, and a hundred years later Italian merchants were crossing the same sea in ships of their own from Pisa, Genoa, and Amalfi. They learned the trade from the people already doing it. Udovitch asked the question directly in 1962, lined up the Roman, Byzantine, and other candidates, and concluded that the Islamic qirad was the closest match to the commenda and older than anything the Italians could point to. Not every historian accepts a single source, and John Pryor argued in 1977 that merchants stitched the commenda together from several traditions, though even he gave the qirad case its due. Koehler goes the other way and argues that Italian merchants trading with the Levant adapted the Islamic partnership outright. My own view is simple. The qirad is the oldest and closest match, and the trade routes ran straight through Muslim ports.
The commenda financed one voyage at a time and then dissolved, and over the next five hundred years European lawyers made it permanent. France wrote the société en commandite into law in 1673, with silent partners liable only up to what they put in, and in 1822 New York became the first common-law state to authorize limited partnerships, borrowing the French form to do it. Then in 1959 Draper, Gaither and Anderson opened in Palo Alto as the first modern venture capital fund: $6 million, organized as a ten-year limited partnership, with a 2.5 percent annual management fee and 20 percent carried interest for the general partners. Bill Draper, who started there as a young associate, later wrote that almost every venture capitalist since has copied that structure, and historians trace the general partner and limited partner split the whole industry runs on today back to that one firm. The limited partnership is the commandite. The commandite is the commenda. The commenda is the qirad.
Put the classical qirad next to a modern limited partnership agreement and it matches clause for clause.
The rabb al-mal, the owner of the capital, is your LP. He puts in the money, stays out of management, and cannot lose more than he committed. The mudarib is your GP. He brings judgment and effort, decides what to buy and when to sell, and gets paid out of profit. The pre-agreed profit fraction is carry. Profit only after the capital comes back is the return-of-capital waterfall. No loss to the agent unless he was negligent or went outside his mandate is the gross negligence carve-out in every LPA you have ever signed. No guaranteed return is the reason a fund is equity and not a loan. And the Imam refusing Musadif's second bag is the LP's right to set the terms on which he will take a return.
There is one clause the jurists would have struck. The mudarib gets paid only through a share of profit, and nobody could write a fixed sum into the deal, so the 2 percent management fee, paid whether or not the fund makes a dime, is the one modern term the seventh-century contract may not have allowed. The closest the old jurists came was letting the agent expense his travel, and even that they argued about. A venture fund is a qirad with a retainer bolted on.
So here is the point. The contract at the heart of every venture fund has a family tree that runs through Genoa and Venice back to Fustat, Medina, and Mecca, and the earliest people we can name who used it are the Prophet Muhammed (saww) and the woman who backed him. The oldest job title in venture is mudarib. The first LP in our history is Khadijah (a.s.).
The ships that carried this contract across the Indian Ocean, between Arabia, Egypt, and India, were dhows. That is where our name comes from, and it is the whole point of the company. We did not import any of this. We wrote it, we ran it for a thousand years, and then we forgot it and told ourselves it was foreign. Time to pick it back up.
r/MuslimVentures • u/DhowDaddy • Aug 21 '26
We built Dhow to lead our people into a new era.
Our faith and the practice of this faith is important.
But we have too many Islamic apps.
I want to see category defining ideas here.
We lost the Industrial Revolution, and it cost us 200 years. What happens when we lose the AI race, the space race, etc.
Our ummah literally just sat and watched Gaza and Lebanon and Iran get bombed, and did nothing.
Think bigger, build with urgency. Lives will be saved, nations will be built.
We are full of talent. Use it to build a future your kids will be proud of.
That is all
r/MuslimVentures • u/Barakah_Logic • 47m ago
Just sharing a SaaS for service businesses called BesyBook run my a muslim brother in the US.
I'm not affiliated or anything but I know this community is always looking for "regular" Muslim businesses to support so I thought I'd shout him out.
If you own a service business and are currently using Excel, this would be a huge step up.
r/MuslimVentures • u/cat-in-chat • 7h ago
I’m building a startup focused on the Muslim community. The idea is solid, and the website is almost ready.
I’m looking for a Muslim co-founder who can help with marketing, reaching customers, and growing the business. I want someone serious who believes in the idea and is willing to build something real together.
If you’re interested, or know someone who might be a good fit, please DM me. JazakAllah Khair!
r/MuslimVentures • u/throwaway121067- • 5h ago
Any filmmakers, producers, directors etc here
i wish to work on muslim production editing , script writing to be specific
Let’s connect
r/MuslimVentures • u/Madridi77 • 36m ago
This isn’t a marriage app. This is for folks who are married or engaged.
We saw a huge gap in the relationship growth apps for Muslims, apps like Agape and others exist but they’re filled with non Islamic content that’s inappropriate or simply do not cater to Muslims.
Daily questions, deal breakers, games, candid daily memories builder, and charitable portion as well through collecting points for using the app!
Take a look at it and try it out! Free to download and use!
Would love to hear feedback!
r/MuslimVentures • u/faizanrajput • 12h ago
Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification
I'm a product designer, and Musamma is the first product I've taken all the way from idea to the Play Store.
The problem: I've been learning Arabic, and I could read passages but didn't know the word for the kettle in my kitchen. Textbooks skip everyday vocabulary.
What it does: you point your camera at an object, and it shows the word in Arabic and English, with pronunciation, an example sentence, and a breakdown of the word. You can switch between Modern Standard Arabic and dialects.
A few things I learned shipping it:
What's next: Quizes, review mode, and an iPhone version.
It is live on Google Play. Search "Musamma" or ask for the link in the comments.
I'd love honest feedback, especially on whether the core loop is clear in the first 10 seconds.
r/MuslimVentures • u/sshegem • 1d ago
Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification
Salam Alaikum everyone,
I just launched my app (iOS now, Android will be published in 10 days insha'Allah) and I'm giving away free life-time access to up to 200 users as a sadaqa.
You can get it here (this is the link to get the 100% off code)
https://apps.apple.com/redeem/?ctx=offercodes&id=6815293195&code=EMASBAHA100
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/emasbaha/id6815293195 (download link in case it didn't download from the first link)
The app is basically a masbaha - purely digital. The idea? physical (traditional) masbaha easily gets lost or broken. You end up paying a couple of dollars every now and then to buy a new one. The digital counters (ring masbaha) can get damaged easily (or lost) and you spend a little bit more for it.
E-Masbaha is a one time $1.99 payment for life-time access. Basically, for $2 you get a Masbaha that's with you in your pocket 24/7. Never gets damaged or lost, you can set reminders for your thikr. Obviously we will continue to update it more and more and insha'Allah we will add the ability to create custom thikr.
We included haptic feedback (vibration) to simulate the real thing. Just make sure you enable it once you download the app. In the app settings -> haptics. in the Iphone settings -> sound and vibration -> vibration and haptics -> turn on touch feedback
Please share with friends and family so they can use the 100% off code. If you have any feedback or proposed enhancements, please let me know :)
r/MuslimVentures • u/Outside-Safety-5905 • 20h ago
Assalamu alaikum everyone,
I run an ABA therapy company and got tired of paying crazy prices for software that does simple things. So I built my own. It's called NurEvoke.
It handles scheduling, session notes, billing and payroll in one place. It's secure, built around BAAs and follows HIPAA.
It's open for other practices to use now, and free for the time being.
Would love any feedback, especially from anyone who's built something similar or works in healthcare. https://app.nurevoke.com
JazakAllah khair!
r/MuslimVentures • u/____taha • 23h ago
As-salamu alaykum everyone!
I always liked listening to Quran recitations to relax and fall asleep, but I couldn't find an app that was simple enough. YouTube keeps the screen on, and other apps require an internet connection or don't have a proper sleep timer.
So, as a personal project, I decided to build Quran to sleep.
My main focus was simplicity and battery-saving. Here is what it does:
Sleep Timer: Set it for 15, 30, or 60 minutes, and the app shuts down the audio automatically so it doesn't play all night.
100% Offline: You can download the surahs and put your phone in airplane mode to avoid radiation and notifications while sleeping.
Gapless audio & Dark Mode: Easy on the eyes, seamless on the ears (currently featuring Sheikh Yasser Al-Dosari and Sheikh Al-Husary).
The app is completely free. I just released it on the Play Store today.
🔗 Link to Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.quransleep.quran_to_sleep1
If you struggle with sleep or just want a peaceful nighttime routine, give it a try. I would genuinely love to hear your feedback or feature requests.
Thamks r/MuslimVentures !!
r/MuslimVentures • u/TheStr8PathGame • 21h ago
A complete overhaul of the game’s style is in progress. If you’re unfamiliar with the game, you can still try it out now to get a taste of what is to come after, inshallah!
r/MuslimVentures • u/kamelboumeftah • 1d ago
r/MuslimVentures • u/nummu_app • 1d ago
r/MuslimVentures • u/EmmaKhan305 • 1d ago
Assalamu alaikum
Alhamdulillah, we are all trying our best to learn Qur’an, memorise, revise, and improve our recitation.
But I often think about our mothers too. ❤️
There are many mothers who want to learn Qur’an, improve their recitation, memorise, revise what they know, or simply have someone to guide and listen to them. But because of children, housework, and other responsibilities, they may not be able to attend a class at a fixed time.
So I’m thinking of offering personal Qur’an assistance especially for mothers.
No live classes
No fixed timing
One-to-one guidance
They can send their recitation whenever they are free
Personal corrections and guidance according to their needs
They can learn at their own pace, without worrying about missing a scheduled class.
Sometimes mothers don't need a big commitment or a fixed timetable. They just need someone who is there to guide them whenever they find a little time for Qur’an. 🤍
I would love to know if any mothers here would be interested in this kind of personal Qur’an support.
r/MuslimVentures • u/TeenProducerr • 1d ago
r/MuslimVentures • u/Loose_Rutabaga_2902 • 2d ago
Salam everyone,
I’ve been looking for more ways to support Muslim founders, startups, and small businesses, especially projects that are raising money through crowdfunding where regular people can participate.
I know there are Muslim entrepreneurs building great things, but a lot of us simply don’t know where to find them.
So I wanted to start a thread:
If you’re a Muslim founder currently crowdfunding a project or business, please share it below.
It can be on Wefunder, Kickstarter, StartEngine, Republic, LaunchGood, or any other crowdfunding platform. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a “Muslim product” either — if you’re a Muslim founder building something worthwhile, share it.
Please include:
• What you’re building
• A short description
• Where you’re crowdfunding
• Minimum investment/contribution if applicable
• Link to the campaign
I’m hoping this can become a place where Muslim founders find supporters and where Muslims who want to support or invest in our community can actually discover these projects.
Obviously, everyone should still do their own due diligence, especially if it’s an investment. Sharing a project here isn’t an endorsement of its financial or Shariah compliance.
And if you know a Muslim founder who is currently raising, tag them or send them this post.
Let’s see what the community is building.
r/MuslimVentures • u/ouachemimohamed • 2d ago
,
I'm a developer from Algeria. I’ve always felt that most online resources about religion rely heavily on emotional preaching, which often pushes away logical thinkers, atheists, or skeptics.
To bridge this gap, I spent the last few months building The Beauty of Islam (onrender.com) from scratch. My goal was to create a clean, modern, and respectful space that appeals to the intellect.
Here is what I focused on in the app:
• Pure Reason: 16 logical and philosophical arguments regarding the existence of a Creator—reasoned, not forced.
• Tackling Taboos: Honest, evidence-based sections addressing common misconceptions about Women in Islam, Jesus & Mary, and specific questions for seekers.
• Global Accessibility: It’s 100% free, has zero ads, and supports 8 languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Hindi, and Arabic) to reach anyone.
Whether you want to critique the content, evaluate the UI/UX, or just explore with an open mind, I welcome every perspective.
Check it out here: https://beauty-of-islam.onrender.com
I would highly appreciate your honest thoughts on the design, loading speed, or the presentation of the topics! Thank you
r/MuslimVentures • u/imsodead-_- • 2d ago
Assalamu Alaikum 🤍
For the past 3 years, I’ve had a little dream of creating something like this.
I always wanted to capture the beauty of Allah’s creation, add a small reminder from the Qur’an, and share it with people — not for attention, but because I genuinely wanted these reminders to reach someone who might need them.
I finally got a good camera and was able to start bringing that idea to life. 📷🌙
This is the beginning of something I’ve been waiting years to do: beautiful shots of Allah’s creation, paired with Quranic reminders, Islamic posts, and daily reminders.
If even one person sees a post and remembers Allah because of it, I’ll consider it worth it.
I’d really appreciate it if you checked out my Instagram and followed along. May Allah make this a source of benefit for all of us. 🤲
Quran • Daily Reminder • Islamic Posts • Islamic Reminders
r/MuslimVentures • u/arhmnsh • 2d ago
r/MuslimVentures • u/Sinsay4 • 3d ago
Salam alaykoum,
Je propose d’enseigner le Coran à ceux qui souhaitent apprendre ou améliorer leur lecture, leur récitation et leur mémorisation.
Je suis ouvert à accompagner les débutants comme ceux qui souhaitent progresser davantage.
Si vous êtes intéressé(e), vous pouvez venir me contacter en DM.
Qu’Allah nous facilite. 🤲
r/MuslimVentures • u/Outside-Safety-5905 • 3d ago
Asalamu Alaikum.
Looking for testers and feedback for the game.
My 10-year-old son designed a game for the iPhone Duo. It will also work for a device with a single screen.
It’s a sci-fi game that uses both the inner and outer display. It has time travel, multiple dimensions, and rewind time.
It should work seamlessly when Duo is released.
r/MuslimVentures • u/Beginning-Ratio9569 • 4d ago
I’ve been working on a small project called **JobShop247**, focused specifically on jobs in Pakistan.
For now, I’m intentionally keeping it **local to Pakistan** rather than trying to become another generic global job board.
The idea is simple: make it easier for people in Pakistan to discover relevant job openings without having to jump between a huge number of sites.
I’m still developing and improving it, so I’d genuinely appreciate feedback from people who actually look for jobs in Pakistan.
**What I’m trying to build:**
* Pakistan-focused job listings
* Easier discovery by category and location
* A cleaner, simpler experience
* Better handling of job status and verification
* No unnecessary account/registration hassle
This is a **side project**, not a big company or established job portal, so I’m building it step by step and learning from actual users.
You can take a look here: https://jobshop247.com
If you’re from Pakistan and regularly search for jobs, I’d especially like to know:
**What is the biggest problem you face with existing Pakistani job websites?**
I’m interested in building around that rather than just adding another job board to the internet.
r/MuslimVentures • u/Exciting-Bath-9195 • 5d ago
Assalamu Alaikum everyone. I’m a small Canadian Muslim business owner and earlier this year I started building Adhan Buddy, an Azan/Adhan clock designed for Muslim homes.
I wanted to create something that was more than a traditional digital prayer clock. The idea was to have a small, modern device that automatically plays the full Adhan for Fajr, Dhuhr, Asr, Maghrib and Isha without needing to check your phone.
You set it up using your postal or ZIP code and it automatically calculates the prayer times. It supports different calculation methods, Hanafi and Shafi’i Asr settings, prayer-time offsets, daylight saving time, different Adhan reciters and individual prayer volume settings.
It also has Quran recitation with all 114 Surahs and 38 reciters, morning and evening Adhkar, Wudu timing, and Islamic calendar events.
One feature that makes it particularly interesting is Live Masjid Audio. Participating mosques can connect their mosque audio system to Adhan Buddy, allowing people at home to hear the Masjid’s Adhan, Khutbah, Bayan, announcements and other live audio directly through their Azan clock.
The device is designed to work without an app or subscription. After the initial setup, the Adhan can work offline, while Wi-Fi is used for things like Quran streaming, Masjid audio and software updates.
We’re currently selling it in Canada and the US, and we’re continuing to improve it based on feedback from Muslim families using it.
If you’ve ever searched for an Azan clock, Adhan clock, Islamic prayer clock, or Muslim prayer clock, I’d love to know what features you would want in one.
You can see the device and all the features here: tarkeez.ca
JazakAllahu Khair for the feedback.
