Nominate the 50 Most Innovative Global Muslim Startups of 2023
From 2015 to 2023 - Reflecting on 250 Global Muslim Startups
The 50 Most Innovative Global Muslim Startups for 2023 will be announced - March 1st, 2023
Through our research and analysis over the last seven years, we have now identified 220 companies that we have followed starting in 2015, at a time when global Muslim startups were just starting to grow.
In total 70 of these companies have raised in excess of $400-$500 million dollars in venture capital, and philanthropic investments.
For our 2022 list, 19 of the companies have publicly disclosed fundraising, raising nearly $212 million dollars between them.
42 of the companies featured on our 2022 list have female founders.
From publicly accessible records on Crunchbase, we have found 196 global venture capital firms, and individual investors funding this group of companies we have featured.
Many of the companies have also raised money within community networks, from non-institutional investors. This data and the set of investors tied to it is much more difficult to capture.
This is also not to discredit the many successful companies on our lists who have bootstrapped for years and grown into successful businesses. Like LaunchGood who has a globally distributed team of more than 100 employees and has crowdfunded $275 million dollars across 36,000 from 151 countries.
175 of the 220 companies are still in operation today
These companies are from 20 countries
And are headquartered in 65 cities around the world
On a somewhat surprising note, 89 of these companies are headquartered in the United States, making up 40.8% of the companies featured.
Of those companies, the majority are located in New York/ New Jersey, Southern California, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Texas.
32 of these companies are from the United Kingdom, with 27 being headquartered in London. London is the city with the highest concentration of global Muslim startups out of any one city.
29 of these companies are headquartered across Southeast Asia from Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore.
Almost all of the 37 non-profits we featured in the articles are still in existence and have raised tens of millions of dollars collectively.
This is important to note especially because nonprofits can be more difficult to build than for-profit companies, and we live in a time where venture philanthropists like McKinzie Scott are making major gifts to highly successful nonprofits. This past June when she $2.7 Billion dollars to high-impact nonprofit organizations she gave major gifts to five Muslim-led nonprofits — Inner-City Action Network (IMAN), Unity Productions Foundation (UPF), Muslim Advocates, Pillars Fund, and ACCESS.
There have been at least 5 merger and acquisitions deals that we are aware of involving the following companies — Muslim Pro, Mvslim, Affinas Labs, Traveazy (formerly Holiday ME) acquired TripFez but now they may become independent again, Zileej acquired Gould Studio, but now they are separate companies again.
At least six of the companies featured were accepted into top tech and nonprofit accelerator programs like Y Combinator, 500 Startups, and New Media Ventures.
Nominations for the 50 Most Innovative Global Muslim Startups of 2023 - Deadline March 28
We use a broad definition for the term startup, it can include for-profit companies and nonprofits. These companies should be Muslim-founded or Muslim-focused startups, they should have been started in the last 1-3 years. The company must have launched to be eligible for nomination or have raised pre-launch funding. They can be located anywhere in the world, however, if your website is not in English please send us details of what you do and why you should be included in the list. You can nominate yourself or a company you think should be included. You can nominate multiple startups but please only use this form once per company.