Company: Able Finance
Founder and CEO: Islam Shazhaev
Website: https://www.able.finance/
About Able Finance
Able Finance began with a frustration that Islam Shazhaev could not shake. He is a practising Muslim, he has been building companies since 2017, and yet he could find no simple way to park his own money somewhere that stayed fully halal and held its value against inflation. Even in the UAE, the few Sharia-compliant banks buried users in paperwork. Able is the answer he built for himself. It has raised a $5 million pre-seed from private family offices and goes live by the end of summer 2026, starting with a stablecoin debit card and, soon after, a halal stablecoin called USDa.
The hard part was making something feel modern and rooted at once. Islam wanted a product as sharp as any consumer fintech, without treating compliance as an afterthought. His team comes from mainstream startups and most of them are practising Muslims, which is how the two halves hold together. Credibility was the next test. He is not a scholar and will not rule on scripture, so Able is forming a Sharia board and onboarding its first scholars to draw that line for him. The rest he learned the long way, founding company after company since 2017, scaling a mobile game to 1.3 million users, and discovering that people who fit a culture matter more than people who only bring a CV.
Able is still pre-launch, so its mark on the region sits mostly ahead of it. The promise is plain: a Muslim in Dubai, or in Tashkent or Jakarta, picking up a phone and accessing halal finance without an Emirates ID or the right passport. Islam leans on deep networks across the Gulf and Central Asia, and is bringing on Khabib Nurmagomedov as the face of it. He has been here before, helping build Dizzaract, the Abu Dhabi game studio billed as the largest in the Middle East. With Able, he wants to do for Muslim finance what he did for Muslim gaming: change how the world expects Muslim-built business to look.
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