Wafr raises pre-seed and launches WafrChain for on-chain sukuk

Wafr raises a pre-seed round from angel investors and launches WafrChain. The Dubai-based Islamic fintech announced the undisclosed pre-seed financing and the live launch of its first product on 10 November 2026. Named individual investors include Coen Jonker, co-founder of Tyme Group and former Commonwealth Bank of Australia Group Executive, and Neal Cross, co-founder of PictureWealth and former Chief Innovation Officer of DBS Bank. Wafr was founded in 2026 by Chief Executive Officer Mahmoud Bouchelif and Chief Product Officer Anthony Murphy. Bouchelif is a former Islamic banker and founder of LeanTech SG. Murphy has launched digital banking products at AMP, Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Macquarie Bank. The company is building a global Islamic financial platform designed to make Shariah-compliant services more transparent and accessible across borders for individuals, businesses and institutions. WafrChain is a private, permissioned blockchain that brings sukuk issuance, distribution, settlement and profit payments onto a single institutional platform. Instrument terms such as unit price, profit schedule and maturity are recorded on-chain together with the approval of the issuer’s own Shariah board before distribution. Wafr’s Shariah board works with each issuer to confirm structural compliance. Settlement can take place in fiat currency through local real-time gross settlement systems and SWIFT, or in stable coins. The company reports transaction finality of approximately 300 milliseconds. Traditional sukuk issuance often involves multiple intermediaries and can take many months, and in some cases more than a year, to bring to market. Fragmented records and repeated reconciliation add cost and operational risk. WafrChain aims to reduce that friction by connecting the parties involved in the sukuk lifecycle through a shared record and by using smart contracts to route profit payments. The platform addresses a global sukuk market that stood at $1.14 trillion outstanding in 2025, with annual issuance growing 14.5 percent to $291.4 billion according to industry figures cited by the company. Sukuk tokenization is now live on WafrChain. Beyond the first product, Wafr’s roadmap includes fund tokenization, trade finance, tokenized deposits, cross-border remittances, global accounts and cards. The company has said agentic artificial intelligence and stable coin-enabled settlement will form part of its longer-term architecture. Consumer-facing services will be introduced subject to regulatory approvals and in partnership with licensed entities where required. The pre-seed capital will support further development of the platform and the institutional network around WafrChain. No investment amount, valuation or exact equity terms were disclosed. The announcement does not name additional investors beyond Jonker and Cross, nor does it provide a timeline for the next funding round or for the broader product roadmap. In the Gulf, where Islamic finance remains a core part of capital markets and sovereign issuance, infrastructure that shortens the sukuk lifecycle and records Shariah approvals on-chain is of practical interest to issuers, arrangers and institutional buyers. Whether WafrChain gains meaningful adoption will depend on the number of institutions that join the permissioned network, the volume of live issuances, and the clarity of the regulatory path for tokenized instruments in the UAE and other markets. If subsequent disclosures name additional investors, a valuation, or the first live institutional issuances on WafrChain, the scale of the platform will become clearer. Until then, the combination of an undisclosed pre-seed and a live sukuk tokenization product marks the formal entry of a new Dubai-based player into the on-chain Islamic capital markets segment.