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

Raf'a