Interest? Not Interested!

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Startup: Halvest
Ask: $2 Million

In 2018, Ridwan Sanusi found a new career obsession that made him quit his consulting job without telling his family.

Ridwan had started out as a banker at Access Bank, then moved into consulting, where he went digging for alternatives to the lending models he’d grown bored of in traditional banking. That search led him to Islamic finance, his newest obsession.

Islamic Finance is a system built on asset-backed deals and shared risk instead of interest. Globally, it’s a giant. Islamic finance assets hit roughly $6 trillion in 2024 and are projected to near $9.7 trillion by 2029.

In Nigeria? Barely a rounding error; which is ironic given that 56% of Nigerians are muslim. Non-interest banking accounts for just 1.7% of the country’s total banking assets. Tens of millions of Nigerians want to grow their money without compromising their values, but they can’t do that easily.

So Ridwan started teaching. For two years, he ran what was arguably Nigeria’s first Instagram class on halal investing. His students kept asking the same question: this is great, but where do we actually put our money?

Halvest is his answer. It started as an investment club in 2021 with a single ₦7 million cheque into a business Ridwan had consulted for. That business started with ₦1 million in 2015. Today it generates ₦6 to 7 billion in revenue.

The model is private credit, done the halal way. Halvest doesn’t buy Sukuk or run mutual funds. It finances inventory for real businesses with short operating cycles. Think of a laptop trader who buys stock, sells it in months, and comes back for a bigger cycle. Halvest doesn’t even hand the business owner cash. It pays suppliers directly, which keeps the money doing exactly what it was raised to do.

The filter for deals is strict. Businesses must be Sharia-compliant, generate cash quickly, and ideally earn dollars, a lesson learned after naira devaluation forced Halvest to pause its foreign investors. But Ridwan’s real underwriting secret is older than any credit model: character. In his experience, losses rarely come from macro shocks. They come from founders who go quiet when things break. So he backs people who communicate, then finances them again and again. Some businesses have run repeat cycles with Halvest since 2021.

Then there’s the transparency. Investors on the platform see the memo, the financials, the credit rating, and the track record of every business before committing. You’re not buying a black box. You’re making the decision yourself.

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Halvest has deployed over ₦14 billion in investments since 2021, all without marketing. Growth has been 100% organic and referral-driven, because the target customer doesn’t click Facebook ads.

The customer is deliberately upmarket. The platform has 1,400 registered users, and about 300 of them are active investors. The minimum ticket is ₦1 million, and individual investors put in anywhere from ₦20 million to ₦300 million. Halvest earns by structuring and participating in the deals it lists, holding transactions on its own balance sheet rather than acting as a pure marketplace.

The business is now in its fourth act. Ridwan describes three evolution stages so far: coaching, investment club, investment platform. Stage four is infrastructure. Halvest secured a fund manager licence from Nigeria’s SEC, hired a Chief Investment Officer with NGX and ARM experience, and is in talks to acquire a microfinance bank licence to build its own banking products. It’s also piloting a Cooperative OS that digitizes the informal savings groups millions of Africans already trust, with two clients about to go live. The wedge is clever: meet people inside the ajo and cooperative systems they already use, then graduate them into regulated investment products.

To fund the build, Halvest is raising $2 million. It has closed $300,000 and holds another $390,000 in commitments, mostly from its own community of investors. Ridwan is upfront that he’s not chasing venture-scale returns or venture-style pressure. He wants aligned capital, structured more like angel money, with buybacks and dividends offering investors liquidity over a five- to seven-year horizon.

The prize here is bigger than a niche. Nigeria’s non-interest finance market was worth just $2.3 billion in 2021, a sliver of a global industry measured in trillions. The gap between demand and supply is the opportunity, and the early movers are proving it: TAJBank, the country’s largest non-interest bank, grew assets 41% to ₦1.34 trillion in 2025.

Halvest’s positioning is the smart part. Ridwan deliberately avoids branding it as a Muslim-only platform. In Nigeria’s charged religious climate, “ethical” travels further than “Islamic,” and the strategy is working: a former CEO of a top-tier Nigerian bank, a Christian, invested through the platform. In Ridwan’s words, Halvest indirectly competes with Cowrywise, Rise, and Bamboo, not just other Islamic finance players.

Our take: Halvest has done the hard thing first. It built a profitable, trusted, sustainable business before chasing scale, and its investor community doubles as its cap table, its referral engine, and its deal pipeline. The risks are real. Private credit is unforgiving, character-based underwriting is hard to systematize beyond a founder’s judgment, and the licence-stacking strategy will stretch a team of 11. But if Halvest becomes the infrastructure layer for ethical finance across Africa, it won’t just win a niche. It will have built the category.

Halvest is raising $2 million. If you’d like an introduction or a look at the data room, reply to this email.

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Until next week! 🫡

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