UAE fintech Wafr raises angel pre-seed to tokenise sukuk on private chain

Wafr, a UAE financial technology company, has closed an undisclosed pre-seed round backed by individual investors, including Coen Jonker and Neal Cross. The company has also launched WafrChain, its first product, now live for tokenised, Shariah-compliant sukuk.

Jonker co-founded Tyme Group and previously served as a group executive at Commonwealth Bank of Australia. Cross co-founded PictureWealth and was chief innovation officer at DBS Bank. Their participation gives Wafr angel backing from operators with banking and digital-finance experience as it builds a global Islamic finance platform.

Wafr was co-founded in 2026 by Mahmoud Bouchelif, its chief executive, and Anthony Murphy, its chief product officer. The company describes its purpose in two words: “Abundance for everyone.” Its stated aim is to make fair, transparent and ethical financial services accessible across borders, with a platform rooted in Shariah-compliant principles and open to people of every faith. Wafr wants to connect institutional infrastructure with services for individuals, businesses and financial institutions.

A shared record for a fragmented process

WafrChain is a private, permissioned blockchain. It is designed to link institutions across the sukuk lifecycle through a shared record, replacing a process in which each party keeps its own version of the same instrument. A single sukuk issuance typically involves eight separate parties: the issuer, trustee, arrangers, Shariah board, custodians, paying agent, distributors and investors. Transfers, profit payments and corporate actions are re-keyed and reconciled between them, adding cost, delay and error risk.

The instrument terms — unit price, profit schedule and maturity — are recorded on-chain. So is the issuer’s own Shariah board approval, which must be in place before distribution. Wafr’s Shariah board works with each issuer to confirm the structure is compliant. WafrChain then connects issuers with distributors and institutional buyers, and uses smart contracts to route profit payments.

Settlement can take place in fiat currency or stablecoins. Fiat settlement is supported through local real-time gross settlement systems and SWIFT. Institutions can connect their existing systems through a single API. WafrChain transactions reach finality in 300 milliseconds.

Privacy is built into the design. Each participant sees only its own activity, so issuers, distributors and investors can keep their positions hidden from one another. The network is also designed to keep operating with only one third of its nodes active. That combination — shared validation without shared visibility — matters because sukuk issuance is a multi-party workflow in which institutions guard their books and their client relationships.

Why the timing matters

The market Wafr is targeting is large. Global Islamic finance assets reached $6.5 trillion in 2025, up 9% year on year, according to the ICD-LSEG Islamic Finance Development Report 2026. Sukuk outstanding stood at $1.14 trillion, while annual sukuk issuance rose 14.5% to $291.4 billion. Yet bringing a single sukuk to market can take many months, and in some cases more than a year. Much of that time is consumed by coordination and reconciliation across the eight-party structure rather than by the underlying asset or the Shariah analysis.

WafrChain’s bet is that a shared, permissioned record can compress that coordination without forcing institutions onto a public network or asking them to expose positions to competitors. The private-network model is a compromise: it keeps control with known participants while giving them a common source of truth for terms, approvals and payments. For a market built on documentation and approval chains, the appeal is a single audit trail rather than a new ledger for each deal.

Founders and their pitch

Bouchelif is a former Islamic banker and founder of LeanTech SG, which he built into a profitable business with seven-figure revenue without external funding. He also advised GCC banking leaders on digital transformation for about a decade. Murphy’s experience includes launching digital banking products at AMP, Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Macquarie Bank.

Bouchelif said Islamic finance can bring abundance to people, businesses and economies, but access to services that reflect its principles remains uneven. He said Wafr is for “anyone who believes finance should be fair, transparent and ethical, whatever their faith.” WafrChain, he added, gives institutions “a foundation for bringing Shariah-compliant assets on-chain.”

anyone who believes finance should be fair, transparent and ethical, whatever their faith.

Murphy said Wafr “starts with problems people and businesses actually face and solves them practically.” He described technology as critical to making Shariah-compliant and ethical services “simpler, more accessible and more relevant,” and said WafrChain is the first product built with that thinking and sets the company’s direction.

Investor view

Jonker said he had long believed someone would build “a truly global digital finance business for the Muslim world.” The need is clear, the opportunity is enormous, and technology makes it possible to think beyond traditional banking, he said. Wafr, in his view, pursues that ambition with a clear sense of purpose.

Cross said Islamic finance was built on trust, transparency and shared risk, “which blockchain does best.” He said Wafr is one of few teams starting with the customers who need it most. He also said the founders “do not build things for show,” which made backing them an easy decision.

What comes next

The institutional roadmap includes fund tokenisation, tokenised deposits, trade finance and B2B settlement. On the consumer side, Wafr plans global accounts, cross-border remittances and cards. Its wider development strategy includes agentic AI and stablecoin-enabled settlement. The company aims to expand access for unbanked and underserved communities across markets.

Consumer services will follow applicable regulatory processes and approvals, with Wafr working with licensed partners where required. That caveat matters: the platform’s institutional product can go live on a private chain, but deposit-taking, remittances and cards sit inside regulated channels that vary by market.

Wafr is trying to build both sides of a financial network — the institutional rails for sukuk and, eventually, the consumer services that sit on top. WafrChain is the first test of whether that shared-record model can win over issuers, distributors and buyers who are used to keeping their own ledgers. The 300-millisecond finality and tolerance for losing two thirds of nodes are technical claims. The commercial test is whether eight parties will agree to use one record.