Zetrix AI Bhd, a Malaysian technology firm, will unveil its NurAI chatbot for Malaysian users on August 12.

NurAI offers guidance in Malay, Indonesian, Arabic, and English on topics such as dining and legal matters based on Sharia, the system of Islamic laws.

The chatbot was built using approaches popularized by China’s DeepSeek, with development support from DeepSeek researchers, including a mixture of experts architecture to optimize performance.

The project is part of the ASEAN-China AI Lab initiative, a government-backed collaboration.

Zetrix plans to offer a free version of NurAI and paid subscriptions ranging from US$5 to US$50 per month.

The company is also working on integrating NurAI into Malaysia’s Sharia-based court system for administrative tasks.

Zetrix aims to expand NurAI to other Muslim-majority countries, training the model with local data.

Other AI chatbots for Muslims exist, but Zetrix positions NurAI as a comprehensive large language model supervised by Islamic scholars from several countries.

🔗 Source: Bloomberg

🧠 Food for thought

1️⃣ Islamic AI market sees simultaneous product launches amid growing demand

NurAI’s launch comes during a competitive period, with at least two other major Islamic AI assistants launching within the same week.

The Muslim AI Companion launched just three days before NurAI’s announcement, positioning itself as “the first multilingual AI-powered Islamic assistant” available in 36 languages and already attracting users from 34 countries 1.

Another similar platform launched six days ago, also claiming to be the “world’s first multilingual Islamic AI for 2 billion Muslims” 2.

This clustering of launches suggests the Islamic AI market has become highly active, with multiple companies identifying immediate commercial opportunities.

The timing indicates that companies are racing to establish market position before competitors can build significant user bases, particularly given the global scale of the target market of 2 billion Muslims worldwide.