Banking 4.0: Inside The Next Chapter Of The MEA's Most Funded Entrepreneur, Mal Founder Abdallah Abu-Sheikh

A regulatory milestone as significant as receiving an in-principle approval from the Central Bank of the UAE to establish a fully licensed bank is one that most fintechs in the region never reach, and yet, for Mal and its founder and CEO Abdallah Abu-Sheikh, it arrives alongside an achievement equally hard to ignore. The startup raised US$230 million in January this year, the largest seed funding round in the MEA, and a sum that would be a defining achievement for most founders on its own. But taken together, these two milestones tell a larger story: that Mal is not simply another digital wallet or payments app, but a serious contender building toward a full banking institution. For Abu-Sheikh, a UAE-based serial entrepreneur returning to the founder’s seat with this new venture, both achievements mark not a destination, but the beginning of a much larger ambition: to build the world’s first artificial intelligence (AI)-native Islamic digital bank, from the Arab world, for the world.

Mal (which translates to “wealth” in Arabic) is perhaps best understood through the lens of technology and finance. Yet, when speaking with Abu- Sheikh, it quickly becomes clear that neither of those elements can fully explain what drew him—having already launched and run successful businesses— to become a founder again with this new venture. “I’ve always been driven by a single metric, which is how much impact can we actually do,” Abu-Sheikh tells Inc. Arabia. “But the metric that most people look at today is how much money one has made, and so, if one has done that, and yet, chooses to become a founder again, they always feel like, ‘Oh, they’ve made a lot of money; why are they coming back to run a business?’ However, if that were the case, you wouldn’t see people like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos still doing business, or still starting new ventures. Because, eventually, you start measuring yourself by how much impact you can have on how many people.”

Such a philosophy helps explain why Abu-Sheikh’s attention has turned to Islamic finance, which, he highlights, is a $7 trillion market that serves nearly two billion people around the world; yet, it remains an industry lacking a defining global institution. But instead of waiting for someone else from another region to build it, Abu-Sheikh believes it can—and should—be built from the Arab world, given that it is the birthplace of this industry. “There are many big problems that people [here] are waiting for someone to come and fix, and Islamic finance is one, but who is gonna come and fix this?” Abu-Sheikh says. “Is it going to be somebody from the US? Is somebody from China going to come and fix this? Probably not. This is one of the very few problems that are indigenous to two billion people, and you cannot expect someone else to come and solve it. That’s just not gonna happen… But it’s a significant challenge that affects the lives of a lot of people, and I thought that I almost have a responsibility to take this on, because of what we’ve done in the past, and because we have the resources and ability to execute.”

Abdallah Abu-Sheikh is the founder and CEO of Mal, the world’s first AI-native Islamic digital bank.

At this point, it is worth pausing to consider Abu-Sheikh’s track record as an entrepreneur. After all, the confidence with which he speaks about tackling a challenge as vast as Islamic finance is not merely aspirational; it is informed by a career spent building businesses at scale. The most recent (and perhaps the best-known) venture he founded was Astra Tech, which, since launching in the UAE in 2022, grew to become a consumer technology holding group focused on transforming everyday services through its “ultra” app. Abu- Sheikh led Astra Tech as CEO until 2024, by which point it had raised $500 million in investment, expanded to 155 countries, and grown to serve more than 150 million users with services ranging from secure voice over internet protocol (VoIP) calling and money transfers, to bill payments and more.

The experience Abu-Sheikh garnered in his time at Astra Tech has also influenced his thinking about where he could create the greatest impact next. “Within our last venture, we learned a lot of things that we feel the market needs, and we’ve seen a lot of gaps that the market does not address,” he explains. “Also, the bigger you become, or the higher your execution and capability becomes, the more responsibility you ought to take on.” And in searching for a challenge capable of affecting millions, if not billions, of lives, Abu-Sheikh found himself increasingly drawn to the subject of wealth, which, he notes, has acquired more than its fair share of negative connotations in recent years.

“There is a lot of guilt associated with wealth [today],” Abu-Sheikh says. “You know, people are now almost thinking that wealth and evil are synonymous, and that is understandable; there’s a lot of bad reputation that comes with bankers and banking. Unfortunately, a lot of banking organizations historically have made their money exploiting the less educated, the less knowledgable, and so on. We’ve also heard tons of stories about people losing their life savings in crypto, in gambling, in investments, in the stock market, what have you. So, there have been a lot of people that have built their careers, companies, and fortunes on top of exploiting the less privileged, and we thought there needs to be a counteract to that. There is still a way of building a very strong financial institution that is rooted in ethics, that is rooted in transparency, that is rooted in the enablement of the less fortunate.”

For Abu-Sheikh, Islamic finance provides the ideal foundation to grow such an enterprise from. “Islamic finance is, you know, a few thousand years old as a science,” he points out. “And it is mainly rooted in two principles. One is that it’s focused on the benefit of society, the benefit of the whole, as opposed to the benefit of the individual, which is what you get in capitalism. And two, it’s about the means and the ends— for a lot of people, the means justify the ends, and that is an excuse a lot of people use [for wrongdoing]. So, for instance, if I’m going to rug pull people on a crypto scam, that’s my means to getting rich and taking care of my family, and so, because the ends are okay, then the means are justified. But in Islamic finance, the means do not justify the ends. So, you want to make a fortune and take care of your family, that’s fantastic, but there is a proper way of going about that.”

With Mal, Abdallah Abu-Sheikh aims to bring a cutting-edge financial institution to every underserved community globally.

It is this vision of ethical finance that sits at the heart of Mal’s proposition, and to realize it at scale, Abu-Sheikh is betting heavily on AI. From his perspective, the rise of AI presents an opportunity to rethink banking from the ground up—something that incumbent institutions may struggle to do, or simply be incapable of doing. “The mega trend hitting the world right now is AI,” Abu-Sheikh declares. “It’s very much like dot-com; it’s very much like software. And banks, to the best of my opinion, are not going to be able to catch up. To become truly AI-native banks, what it’s going to take is for them to fire all their employees, close all their branches, and solely depend on agentic frameworks. Existing banks are not gonna be able to do that, whether it’s for governance and compliance reasons, or [for fears of ] job losses, and what have you… And it’s also gonna be a very difficult call for banks with trillions of dollars of standing assets to say, ‘We’re going to now entrust all of our money and clients’ money to an AI agent.’ It’s not going to happen.”

So, what’s the alternative? The solution, from Abu-Sheikh’s perspective, will not come from retrofitting existing banks for the AI era, but from building new institutions designed around it from the outset—much like Mal. “If you’re AI-native, you’re built on a clean drawing board, you’re built anew, and you’ll be able to implement a lot of AI-native frameworks in place. AI is going to give you two things on top of a regular bank: one, you’re going to have better economics across all of your products; so, you’re going to serve [your customers] cheaper, faster, and so on… Two, you’re going to be more efficient; so, instead of a customer, say, having to go through 20 people and three months of applications to get a mortgage, they’re going to be able to get that done in minutes—and that’s where we’re are aiming to be.”

But for Abu-Sheikh, AI isn’t merely a tool for improving banking services—it’s also a means to bring Islamic finance into a new technological era. “If we look at Islamic finance, much like a lot of other things in this part of the world, they were left behind when technology came,” he notes. “So, for maybe 50 years or so, nobody has touched it. Now, AI is giving us the opportunity to re-digitize Islamic finance. That requires us to build our own indigenous native models, agents that are trained and sit on Islamic finance, and what have you. But it also gives us the opportunity to be the first to actually take out that school of thought or science from the bookshelves, and move it into the actual digital world. That’s how it is looking like for us right now. So, definitely, a lot of what we’re going to be doing in Islamic finance is going to be the first-of its kind; it’s going to be special intellectual property that only we’re working on, with the hopes of being able to open that up, so that a lot of other people can use it and build on top of it eventually.”

Mal is now well on its way to realize this vision that Abu-Sheikh has for it, with the startup securing an in-principle approval from the Central Bank of the UAE in May to establish a licensed bank. When asked if he has any inhibitions about operating Mal in as contested a market as fintech in the MENA (In 2025, McKinsey & Company—one of the world’s leading management consulting firms—noted the number of companies operating in the domain to be more than 1,000), Abu-Sheikh dismisses the idea entirely. “If you look at this space, it’s not as competitive as people think,” he quips. “I’ll give you an example: if you go to play football, and there are a bunch of three-year-olds running around the field, that doesn’t mean it’s a competitive game—it just means it’s crowded!”

In May this year, Mal received in-principle approval from the Central Bank of the UAE to establish a licensed bank.

Abu-Sheikh goes on to question how many of the region’s fintechs truly fit the label, with his argument being that most function primarily as wrappers around banks. “If I come and say, ‘I’m a great fintech,’ and I still sit on top of a bank’s compliance and infrastructure, it means I’m just as slow and expensive as a bank,” he points out. “I’m just adding an extra layer that the user has to pay for. It might offer a better user interface, or an addition or something of the sort, but you have not really truly solved a problem. So, this is where we come in [as Mal]. We believe we need to start at the source, and we really need to go after the problems that people tend to shy away from. For instance, I don’t understand why there are maybe 50 buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) platforms, and nobody is doing, say, a home equity line of credit (HELOC) product. That tells you people want to go after, maybe, the easier, the more fundable products, and leave the actual, the more important, products sort of to the side. But that’s where we think we have a role to play.”

Abu-Sheikh is clearly setting Mal up to be a gamechanger for the MENA fintech landscape; however, he’s equally emphatic that its success will ultimately be determined by execution. That said, Mal is entering this market with resources that few startups can match—its $230 million seed raise, which was led by Abu Dhabi- based global investment platform BlueFive Capital, is giving it a head start that most founders can only dream of. But for Abu-Sheikh, the scale of the investment is rooted as much in the vision he has for Mal as it is in the experience he brings from his previous ventures, particularly Astra Tech. “One thing that counts a lot when you are raising money for a company is track record,” he says. “Investors always want to make sure they have an operator who has built and executed, and there’s also a question about at the scale they’ve done so. Someone who’s built a 10,000 or 20,000 user platform sits in a very different place than someone who’s built a 10 or 20 million- user platform, who, in turn, sits in a very different place from someone who built a 100 or 200 million user platform. So, we’re blessed to have that sort of track record of having been able to build to scale and solve true problems that people were truly facing.”

Abu-Sheikh also highlights the fact that he is among the relatively few entrepreneurs in the region with experience deploying capital at this scale. “There’s not a lot of people that are equipped to deal with so much of other people’s money in our part of the world—it’s very scarce,” he notes. “You don’t have a lot of people who were in that space before. So, I think that sort of got us on a bit of a lucky start. And then, the other part that matters even more is the problem statement you’re going after. Are you going after a problem statement that, say, 500 other people are going after at the same time, or are you not? Does that problem statement require significant capital to kick off and start, or does it not? This was the sort of space that we sort of operated in, and I think that’s what helped us put together, you know, the biggest [seed] round in the history of the region.”

A serial entrepreneur, Abdallah Abu-Sheikh had, prior to Mal, founded Astra Tech, a consumer technology holding group focused on transforming everyday services through its “ultra” app.

But for all the attention this funding round for Mal has attracted, Abu-Sheikh is framing it less as a cause for celebration and more as a responsibility to deliver. “I’m not very proud that we raised a lot of money; I think it’s a good thing, and I love that our investors trust us and believe in us that much,” he says. “But I’d be a lot prouder when we launch, when we have a lot of users on our platform, and when we really solve a true problem for those people.” Securing the region’s largest seed round also comes with obligations of its own, Abu- Sheikh adds. “I just think there’s a lot of responsibility, because when you say you’re the most funded in the region, you’re meant to represent the region to everybody else,” he explains. “Also, if you’re the most funded, you’re also expected to give out products that match that level of service, and so, you have that level of expectation on your shoulders and on your teams. So, it definitely does not make it any easier for us or our teams. If you raise a small round in secret and nobody really knows about you, you get to make a lot of mistakes. But the bar is higher when you’re at this level.”

Abu-Sheikh also needs to contend with operating Mal in a landscape that’s now markedly different from when it secured its investment in January this year. The outbreak of the Iran war in March, while showcasing the criticality of the Middle East to the functioning of the global economy, has also, in his view, reinforced the need for the region to build more of its capabilities from within. “I think that, if anything, what is happening now is just showing us how important this part of the world is, as opposed to the old standing thought of, you know, this is an insignificant part of the world,” Abu-Sheikh says. “It is also showing us the fact that we need to build for ourselves, and we cannot have too much dependency [on imported innovation]. That is where we come in—we at Mal believe in digital sovereignty. We believe that we need to build, digitally, natively, in-house, in-country, and so on. That’s what I personally firmly believe in, and that’s what we believe in as a company as well.”

Mal is also an attempt by Abu-Sheikh to prove that globally relevant innovation can emerge from the Arab world, which, historically, has been known to outsource a lot of its building and production to other parts of the world. “It’s about time that the region started incubating innovation,” Abu-Sheikh says. “And it’s about time we stop being so harsh and judgmental of locally built platforms, and give them at least as much of the benefit of the doubt as we give platforms we are importing.” Plus, as much as Abu-Sheikh is hoping for Mal to become one of the world’s leading challengers in Islamic finance, he believes the venture’s greatest contribution may— ultimately—lie beyond its own success. “Every business that I’ve built in the past has sort of mushroomed other businesses led by other people who’ve learnt within it, and then went on to build their own things,” he says. “And that, I think, is a big part of the message in that when you build at this scale, you go on to create ecosystems for other people who are going to build, and who, in turn, are gonna bring in other people, and so on. And before you know it, there is a very big multiplier effect that eventually leads to a full region full of innovation.”

Now, for an entrepreneur who’s as driven by impact as Abu-Sheikh is, that’s the possibility that may well be his most meaningful measure of success for Mal— the chance to break new ground not just for his own venture, but for the founders who follow.

Pictured in the lead image is Mal founder Abdallah Abu-Sheikh. All images by Inc. Arabia.

This article was originally published in the May - June 2026 edition of Inc. Arabia. Check out the issue in full on this link.