Raf'a

Capital allocation is one of the most powerful levers for shaping economic outcomes. Today’s venture capital system – an integral part of the broader wealth defence industry – disproportionately benefits a small, well-connected group of people. It accelerates and deepens the concentration of wealth, political influence, and systemic inequality. As long as capital remains concentrated, so too does power. Less than 2% of global venture funding reaches racially diverse founders, while the world’s wealthiest continue to grow their fortunes. According to Oxfam, since 2020, the five richest men have doubled their wealth, while nearly five billion people have become poorer. Globally, debt has reached 238% of GDP, totalling $235 trillion (IMF, 2023), creating structural barriers that disproportionately affect underserved communities.

Venture capital, rather than serving as a neutral tool for innovation, is structured to guarantee investor returns while shifting risk to founders, employees, and communities. Mechanisms like preference shares, liquidation preferences, and mandatory redemption rights protect investor profits but constrain founder autonomy and long-term sustainability. This produces vertical flows of capital that extract value from the many to benefit the few.

Founders from the global majority — historically excluded from capital ownership — face systemic barriers, even as they develop solutions at the frontlines of climate resilience, social equity, and economic empowerment. The challenge is not a lack of vision or capability, but a financial and legal architecture designed for accumulation rather than redistribution. Even impact investing and philanthropy, while well-intentioned, often reproduce these dynamics: high financial return requirements can undermine social outcomes, and philanthropic models frequently reinforce dependency instead of ownership.

Raf’a (رفع) – meaning “elevate” in Arabic – was created to address this systemic problem. We see venture capital not merely as a financial activity, but as a moral and social lever: a force to advance justice, equity, human dignity, climate action, and ecological stewardship. Our motivation is rooted in decades of experience across fintech, tech-for-good, governance, social enterprise, alternative finance, fundraising, endowments, Islamic finance, and nonprofit work which gives us a unique perspective on the levers that can redistribute wealth and advance justice, equity, human dignity, climate action, and ecological stewardship. We've seen firsthand how visionary founders from the global majority are excluded from traditional funding models, despite building solutions at the frontlines of climate justice and community resilience. 

Our hack transforms the dominant legal and financial architecture of investment itself: building a community-owned fund and a shared-risk investment product that redistributes both capital as well as decision-making power. Raf’a’s model centres the global majority as co-designers and co-owners. 

The Hacking Wealth Challenge offers exactly the environment we need: space, community, and peer expertise to refine and accelerate this prototype. We see it as a catalytic moment to turn years of research and design into a tangible, operational model. We believe this challenge will offer us a a space to prototype legal and financial interventions, engage with peer experts, and accelerate the translation of research into operational systems that redistribute capital, share risk, and embed participatory governance.

Raf’a reimagines venture capital as a tool for shared ownership, risk, and wealth redistribution. Unlike conventional models that concentrate capital and decision-making, Raf’a is designing an investment structure that circulates resources horizontally among founders, employees, investors, and the communities they serve. At its core, Raf’a intends to transform the architecture of finance, embedding ethics, accountability, and participation into both legal and financial systems.

Our proposed hack combines two complementary interventions that directly subvert wealth defence mechanisms:

a.  Financial Hack: A Shared-Risk Investment Product

Raf’a will prototype a shared-risk investment instrument — a profit-and-loss sharing mechanism that aligns investors and founders as true partners.

In extractive finance, investors capture guaranteed returns and preferential rights (through liquidation preference and mandatory redemption provisions, for example) while founders shoulder risk. Our model flips that dynamic. Capital providers and entrepreneurs share both upside and downside, ensuring that value creation and accountability are mutual. By holding equity in one another: capital owners in investees and entrepreneurs in capital providers, a shared governance model naturally emerges. The well being of one is thus aligned with the other, not only politically and culturally, but legally and economically as well. Through shared risk, reflecting the interdependence of things as they truly are, inclusive governance and shared wealth emerges.

This model is non-extractive, Shariah-compliant, and redistributive by design — replacing debt, interest, preference shares and coercive repayment terms, with equity, ethics, and shared reward.

b. Legal/Governance Hack: A Community-Governed Fund Structure
Alongside the shared-risk investment instrument, the community-governed fund structure rethinks control and ownership.

Traditional venture funds centralise control among limited partners and fund managers, whose fiduciary duties focus on maximising private accumulation who often over lever their investees to extract maximum profit over a short period of time. Raf’a’s prototype, on the other hand,  ensures that investment decisions serve the broader community, not only individual investors.

We are developing a cooperative fund structure that maximises founder and employee co-ownership, enabling founders to maintain control and avoid forced exits. Instead of a hierarchy of investors over beneficiaries, Raf’a’s governance model embeds collective decision-making, distributing ownership and control across those who generate real economic and social value – founders, employees, and the communities they serve. We intend a structure whereby investors and managers hold equity in symmetry with founders and other equity holders, without priority or preference. Founders, moreover, of each investee, in turn, hold equity in the fund which has invested in their initiative. Thus an ecosystem of global majority founders and entrepreneurs is constructed alongside investors and capital.

This design process draws from Islamic economic principles, cooperative law, and the lived experiences of global majority entrepreneurs. In doing so, Raf’a reorients venture capital towards equitable wealth distribution and transparency. 

Together, these two components radically disrupt and rework the mechanisms of wealth accumulation, replacing concentration and protection with participation and redistribution.

Beyond this, Raf’a is not just for Muslims. We are committed to demystifying Islamic finance, which is often misunderstood as religiously exclusive or overly complex, and making it relevant to other communities, be they entrepreneurs or investors. In reality, Islam offers a powerful yet simple framework for equity, shared prosperity, and social good, principles that resonate across cultures and belief systems. By showcasing how Islamic finance can be a tool for universal justice and economic dignity, we aim to shift perceptions and broaden participation in ethical investing.

The wealth defence industry perfects the art of accumulation through complexity. Raf’a simplifies it by turning the same mechanisms into tools for repair. By reclaiming fiduciary duty, cooperative ownership, and profit-sharing, we are demonstrating how wealth itself can become a community asset.

This work is difficult to advance within traditional funding or academic structures, as it challenges the very legal and financial foundations those systems rely on. Through the Hacking Wealth Challenge, our sprint will enable Raf’a to move from research and conceptual design into tangible prototypes ready for pilot testing our methodology that will combine legal design, financial modelling, and participatory co-design. This represents our 0→1 moment. Raf’a’s prototype is small yet catalytic. A legal clause, a fund structure, a financial product — each is a subtle intervention capable of steering the massive ship of finance toward justice when purposed with empathy and inclusivity.

By hacking the very legal and financial tools used for wealth protection, Raf’a reprogrammes the system’s core code, transforming finance from an engine of inequality into an instrument of liberation. Raf’a’s hack doesn’t reject wealth; it redefines its purpose. Through shared-risk finance and collective governance, we build a model where prosperity circulates and wealth enables redistribution, repair, and renewal.

Raf’a was founded to offer an alternative. We see it as a live ‘wealth hack’ – a working example of how the instruments of capital accumulation can be repositioned and repurposed for redistribution. Our model is rooted in Islamic finance principles and cooperative economics, yet it is universal in purpose: to democratise capital and reimagine wealth as a shared resource.

Raf’a has already begun generating insights that demonstrate both the demand for and the potential impact of redistributive finance. In 2024, we conducted a research project with 75+ entrepreneurs, investors, and ecosystem operators. This research confirmed strong appetite for non-extractive, Shariah-aligned capital, as well as governance and financial structures that prioritise shared wealth, accountability, and founder autonomy. Participants expressed support for mechanisms such as profit-sharing, claw-back equity, and non-voting investor rights, highlighting the need for investment models that align social and financial outcomes.

We are building on these relationships and insights through initiatives like the Islamic Impact Investing Conference, which took place in September 2025. This event brought together over 70 investors, philanthropic institutions, and finance practitioners to explore how Islamic principles can drive values-based investing, social justice, and financial sustainability. As part of the conference, we soft-launched Raf’a by pitching it in the Impact Investment Vehicle Showcase, introducing our early model to potential investors and partners. Engagement, feedback, and enthusiasm from these stakeholders confirmed both the urgency and appetite for non-extractive, participatory investment models, validating the relevance and timeliness of Raf’a’s approach.

These outcomes represent the groundwork Raf’a has already laid, providing a strong foundation for sprints funded by the Hacking Wealth Challenge.