As the year comes to a close, it’s a moment to pause and reflect on the collective progress of the Muslims in Tech community. This year has been defined by growth, connection, and a shared commitment to lifting one another across the global tech ecosystem.
🌍 A Growing Global Movement
We crossed a significant milestone this year, with the global Muslims in Tech community surpassing 1,000 members. This growth reflects not just numbers, but a strong sense of belonging among professionals, students, founders, and community builders across different regions.
🤝 Consistent Community Connection
Our fortnightly Melbourne meetups continued strongly throughout the year, creating a regular space for connection, learning, and collaboration. These gatherings have shown the value of consistency, and we look forward to extending this model to other parts of our global community.
🌆 Connecting Professionals Across Cities
We hosted Muslims in Tech Professionals Networking Events in Melbourne and Sydney, bringing together industry professionals at different stages of their journeys. These events created opportunities for genuine conversations, mentorship, and long-term connections. A special shout-out to MCCA Islamic Finance & Investments for sponsoring both the Sydney and Melbourne Professionals Networking Events and making these meaningful gatherings possible.
🚀 Spotlighting Startup Talent
Our Startup Spotlight events in Melbourne and Sydney gave early-stage founders a platform to present their ideas. Finalists from both cities pitched to live audiences and received honest, constructive feedback, along with practical suggestions to help refine and move their startups forward. These sessions reinforced the importance of community-driven support for entrepreneurship.
📱 Growing Our Social Media Community
Our social media presence continued to grow this year, with 1,000+ followers on Instagram, reflecting increasing engagement and interest in Muslims in Tech.
🎤 Collaboration at the Muslim Wealth Summit
We were proud to host the Muslims in Tech panel at the Muslim Wealth Summit, joined by a range of industry leaders, community organizations, and powerhouses from across sectors. The discussion centered on collaboration, shared responsibility, and the importance of working together to advance our community’s collective goals.
🌙 Community Through Faith
Our annual Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane iftars once again brought the community together in a space of reflection, connection, and shared values, reminding us that relationships sit at the heart of everything we build.
🎓 Shaping the Future Generation
We delivered our flagship Careers of the Future program across three schools, introducing students to technology pathways and emerging opportunities. This program is now expanding, allowing us to reach even more young people in the year ahead.
🤖 Learning Through Action
Throughout the year, we also delivered bootcamps on AI and emerging technologies, giving community members hands-on exposure to tools, concepts, and real-world applications that are shaping the future of work.
📬 Strong Engagement and Reach
Our newsletter continues to outperform industry benchmarks, with an average open rate of 45%, compared to the IT and tech industry average of 22.7%. With over 2500 subscribers, this strong engagement reflects a community that values thoughtful, relevant, and purposeful content.
As we look ahead, this year has laid strong foundations for deeper impact, wider reach, and stronger collaboration. None of this would be possible without the people who show up, contribute, and believe in the vision of Muslims in Tech. We’re excited for what’s next, In Sha Allah!
What if AI could be accessed through touch, not sight or sound?
BrailleGPT founded by Dunya Hassan is building a portable, AI-powered Braille device that enables blind, visually impaired, and DeafBlind users to interact with information through real-time tactile Braille. By combining speech input with tactile output, the device offers private, independent access to AI and digital content without relying on screens or audio.
Over 2.2 billion people globally live with vision impairment, and around 70 million people are DeafBlind, yet most AI tools remain visual or auditory. BrailleGPT addresses this gap by translating intelligence directly into touch, creating a tactile-first interface for accessing information.
BrailleGPT has gained early international traction across Australia, Europe, and the United States, including features on European accessibility and technology podcasts. The project has engaged with global accessibility leaders and collaborators.
The startup has also secured early crowdfunding investment, validating strong community demand. The current crowdfunding round is open and closes on 20 January 2026.
Designed as a tactile-first EdgeAI system, BrailleGPT prioritises accessibility, privacy, and efficiency. Rising global RAM costs driven by AI demand have shaped the device’s engineering, pushing the team to build memory-efficient, optimised software that remains scalable and practical.
BrailleGPT is being built with the community it serves, welcoming collaboration from accessibility organisations, researchers, engineers, educators, and early adopters.
🔗 Join the waitlist: braillegpt.com.au
🎥 Inside look:
OpenAI has launched a personalised year-in-review experience called Your Year with ChatGPT. Rolled out to eligible users in selected regions, the feature reflects on how individuals used ChatGPT over the past year, drawing inspiration from Spotify Wrapped to showcase personal usage insights and trends.
Anthropic developed Bloom, an open-source framework designed to automatically evaluate AI model behaviour. Bloom generates targeted scenarios to test behaviours such as self-preferential bias and sabotage, then measures how frequently these behaviours appear across different models. The tool effectively distinguishes between well-aligned and misaligned systems and shows strong agreement with human evaluations, making it a reliable and scalable approach to behavioural assessment in AI.
Google has launched Gemini 3 Flash, a lightweight and high-speed AI model designed to offer frontier-level intelligence with reduced latency. The model is optimised to support quick learning, planning, and building, making it well suited for a wide range of everyday tasks and practical applications where speed and efficiency matter.
We now need your help to continue growing and do the following:
- Expand our Careers of the Future program to 5 schools
- Launch a startup accelerator
- Maintain and grow community events to reach more people and cities
You can be the reason this blessed community continues to grow. Support us today
Invite a friend to be part of the journey and join the community: muslimsintech.org/join
If you know someone interested in joining or who can benefit the community, send them our trusty registration form. We now have members in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Toronto, New York, New Jersey, California and Texas! Let’s introduce you to our Chapter Leads:
Melbourne: Marjan Rahman
Sydney: Umair Shakoor
Brisbane: Revsan Ahmetoglu
Toronto: Hamza Ali
Thanks for reading MiT Newsletter! Subscribe to stay up-to-date with the latest in the Muslims in Tech community and support our work.
Best Regards,
Team Muslims in Tech
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