Affinis Labs is an award-winning social innovation firm that helps clients creatively tackle complex global challenges through entrepreneurship.

Elixir Capital and Affinis Labs have joined forces to launch a new investment fund for startups and growth stage businesses in global Muslim communities and beyond.

Affinis Labs is headed up by Shahed Amullah a veteran in the muslim startup industry. He has been working in the space of the digital islamic economy for quite while. Affinis labs felt that the muslim communities could come up with the best solutions to their own challenges if given a platform and it led to Affinis labs being founded. One of Shahed’s earliest companies were all about focusing on the needs of Muslims in the West called Zabiah.com. These helped him gain a lot of insight into the market that led to a focus on helping muslim lifestyle based products via affinis labs.

Affinis labs works on a number of initiatives to help empower the community and to give them the resources they need to be successful. Everything from doing hackathon based work with the likes of Google or the United Nations to going around the world to help people come up with solutions to their own problem.

They’ve launched an entrepreneurship platform called Minbar which is an online platform that helps people who have never started a business. It’s leveraging the power or social network. It’s been taken to places like Somalia to Iraq and other places. There focussing on going to countries that are often overlooked by existing entrepreneurship ecosystems.

Best practice: Creating a supportive ecosystem