Towards a global Muslim startup ecology: 11 most innovative Asian Muslim startups

This article was written by Dustin Craun, founder and executive editor of Ummah Wide. 

It was a beautiful San Francisco night, and we had just listened to a speech by an international investor about growing global markets and international opportunities for startups. We are building Ummah Wide with global and regional markets on our minds constantly, so we decided to introduce ourselves and tell the investor about our company. Once we said we were focused on the global Muslim market his face changed. He began to look around, and we could tell he was uncomfortable.

We finished our short pitch, he took a breath and said, “You’re really going to have to be careful about infiltrators.” We didn’t know what to say. “You mean like the FBI?”

“No, I mean like ISIS.” Wow.

There are nearly two billion Muslims on the planet, and this is the one story that is told, so it’s not really surprising that someone would say this to us and this experience helped us realize three things:

• It became crystal clear to us how much of an uphill struggle Muslim centric companies face in Western startup communities. This despite the clear market logic that shows that there is almost no greater growth market opportunity, as Muslims make up one-quarter of humanity representing trillions of dollars in potential revenues.
• It affirmed for us how important our work is at Ummah Wide in telling a more diverse and complete story about Muslims globally.
• Finally, it showed us how important it is that we support the growth of a strong global Muslim startup ecology.

Despite this one bad experience we had in San Francisco, we know that with the growth of entrepreneurial and startup communities throughout the world, leaders are focused on strengthening these communities in different cities and regions. We see the emergence of regional technology and startup ecologies across Muslim regions and ethnic groups, ranging from 500 startups funding companies throughout the MENA region and their offshoot 500 Durians based in Malaysia.

In the San Francisco Bay Area where Ummah Wide is based, we have Muppies, Persian Tech Entrepreneurs, OPEN SV focused on the Pakistani tech and entrepreneurship community as well as Tech Wadi and PITME focused on the MENA region and the Turkish Startup Network. We even have a growing presence of venture capital funds from countries such as Malaysia (Khazanah) and Singapore (Temasek and Infocomm Investments) with branches in the Bay Area.

While each of these entities are powerful in their own right, our question here is how would we move beyond only regional startup and entrepreneurship communities to begin thinking about building this global Muslim startup ecology? The 11 companies we feature below, which range across the sectors of media, technology, fashion, tourism, education, finance, food, and non-profits, are trailblazing the global Muslim market and helping to lay the seeds for companies to thrive in this space for generations to come.

In the recent report State of the Global Islamic Economy published by Thomson Reuters Islamic Finance Gateway arm in collaboration with Dinar Standard, it is estimated that in aggregate the Muslim consumer and lifestyle sectors were worth US$1.6 trillion in 2012, with growth of those markets expected to reach US$2.47 trillion by 2018.

While the worth of this market is greater than any regional or national market of Muslims, the same could be said if we were to imagine what the networks of entrepreneurs, tech talent, mentors, and investors would look like if we were able to leverage these regional entrepreneurship networks into a global ecology. This especially makes sense when we have tens of thousands of highly talented and deeply connected Muslims living and working in places like Silicon Valley and San Francisco, New York, London, Paris, Berlin, and Sydney who are globally connected to the other key hubs of Muslim entrepreneurship, life, and culture throughout the world.