Junaid Wahedna is the founder and Chairman of Wahed, the world's first global Islamic robo-advisor. Grew up in Dubai, studied at Columbia University, worked in merchant banking on Wall Street. Built a solo venture that raised $82M and now manages $2B in assets across 130 countries.
Q1: Take me back to the moment you became the person you are now.
I was in a taxi in New York. The driver was Bangladeshi, a practising Muslim. He told me he didn’t want to keep his money in a bank because of riba, so he’d put everything, his entire life savings, into Apple stock because his Imam told him to. That moment hit me. Here was a man doing his best to live by his faith, and the system had given him no real option. I was sitting on Wall Street, surrounded by the most sophisticated financial products in the world, and none of them were built for him. I couldn’t unsee it after that.
Q2: What’s the belief you hold that most people disagree with?
That you don’t need a co-founder. Every VC will tell you otherwise. I also believe the best founders are, to some degree, autocratic. You have to be able to hold your vision when everyone around you is telling you you’re wrong.
Q3: Why did you start Wahed? What was the hardest part? What’s the ultimate goal?
Riba is expressly forbidden in our faith, and yet we’ve completely normalised it. Nobody talks about it because they assume there’s no alternative. I started Wahed to be that alternative.
The hardest part was fighting on two fronts. The conventional financial world wasn’t built for us. But Islamic finance itself had also failed its own people, hiding behind religion as an excuse for bad products and high fees. We call it the “cost of being Muslim.” My job was to eliminate that cost.
The goal is simple: remove interest from Muslim lives, everywhere in the world. We’ve proven the model works. Now we scale.
Q4: What’s your advice to Muslims trying to make an impact?
Solve a problem you’ve lived close to. Stay in control of your mission, don’t let the fundraising process dilute it. And hold yourself to the highest standard, not just the best in the Islamic space. The “cost of being Muslim” shouldn’t exist. Make sure your work proves that.
Q5: What should the Ummah be focused on for the next 10 years?
Economic sovereignty. We are the fastest-growing religious community in the world, and we are moving into the middle class everywhere. But we keep our money in systems built against our values, and most of us don’t even understand why that matters. Financial literacy is the foundation. Once people understand how interest creates inequality, mathematically, structurally, they’ll stop accepting it. That’s where the next decade has to begin.
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