Aramco-backed fintech opens bank branch in London to help Muslims invest

Published

3 years ago

January 24, 2023

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Islamic fintech startup Wahed has opened its first physical branch on Baker Street in London. The glossy retail location is designed to look like an Apple store.

Wahed

An investing platform backed by the likes of oil giant Saudi Aramco and French soccer player Paul Pogba is launching a novel proposition in the U.K.: a physical branch and bank accounts backed by gold.

New York-based Wahed, which describes itself as a “halal investing platform,” has opened a branch in the U.K. in a bid to target the country’s 3.9 million Muslims with a sharia-compliant investment management and advice service.

The glossy retail location has a similar design to an Apple store, with digital displays inside and a bright sign displaying its logo outside. It is located on Baker Street in central London, just opposite a branch of U.K. banking giant HSBC.

Khabib Nurmagomedov, the Russian former professional mixed martial artist, is a promoter of the firm and will be among those attending the branch opening Tuesday.

Wahed is also debuting a debit card that lets users deposit funds with an exchange-traded commodity that tracks the price of gold, meaning they can effectively pay for everyday goods via gold.

Investors will be able to redeem the gold in their accounts for physical bars. Junaid Wahedna, CEO and Co-founder of Wahed, said it’s a way for Muslim — as well as non-Muslim — consumers to beat currency fluctuations and the rising cost of living.

“[Muslims are] an underserved community as a whole,” Wahedna said in an interview with CNBC, referring to the market opportunity for digital Islamic finance. “It’s a minority community, there’s a lack of financial literacy.”

Banking startups such as Monzo and Revolut have flourished in the U.K. without physical bank branches, offering smartphone apps that help users manage all their finances. But Wahedna cautioned that this risks leaving behind Muslim consumers.

“In the United Kingdom, [the Muslim community is] actually one of the lowest socio-economic segments of the country,” Wahed’s boss said, with “low incomes or financial literacy.”

“They have trust issues,” he added. “And so they want to see a physical presence before they trust you with money.”

Wahed’s service aims to help clients adhere to the Islamic faith’s strict doctrines on financial services: sharia law forbids its followers from charging or earning interest on loans, or investing in firms that make most of their money from the sale of things such as alcohol and gambling.

Wahed prohibits investments in companies that make money from lending, gambling, alcohol and tobacco. An account with Wahed also doesn’t offer interest on savings, nor does it tout wild returns on risky crypto tokens. Instead, the value of users’ deposits tracks the value of gold, with the precious metal fluctuating in price depending on supply and demand.

“I think it really fits with the Muslim community and what their needs are,” Wahedna said. “Because otherwise, what happens is the Muslim community, because they’re underserved, they keep their money in cash under their mattress, or in something that’s very unsafe, and they lose their money every few years because there’s a scam in the community or someone takes advantage of them. And that poverty cycle just continues.”

CEO slams lending-focused fintechs

Junaid slammed the state of modern fintech companies, suggesting that the industry is too focused on consumer lending with the rise of Klarna and other hyped “buy now, pay later” services.

“All of their business plans are built around lending revenue, right? Even digital banks, it’s like, okay, I’ll start off being a new bank, but then eventually, I’m gonna get a banking license,” said Wahedna.

Wahed is debuting a debit card linked to a gold-backed spending account. The startup is backed by French soccer star Paul Pogba.

Wahed

He said Wahed is focused on making money by charging wealth management fees, which charge users a percentage of their overall asset holdings. The startup, which was founded in 2017, remains lossmaking, but has hit operating breakeven in Malaysia and the U.S., he added.

“I feel that fintech, like most of the finance industry, is very heavily geared towards lending,” Wahedna said. “In fact, I would say, it’s making the cost of living crisis, a debt crisis, worse with a lot of the products.”

“If you look at the buy, now pay later companies, people are struggling — that’s the worst type of innovation, you’re making it easier to get people into debt,” he added.

Wahedna stressed that the company is not only for Muslims and aims to serve followers of other Abrahamic faiths as well, including Judaism and Christianity.

Staff at its London branch will help customers open accounts, make investments and give guidance on wills and estate planning.

The firm is targeting high-net-worth individuals as well as less well-off consumers, Wahedna said.

Wahed has raised $75 million of total funding to date from investors including Saudi Aramco Entrepreneurship Capital, the venture capital arm of Saudi state-backed oil firm Saudi Aramco, as well as French footballer Paul Pogba, who is a practicing Muslim.

Islamic finance has achieved significant growth over the past decade and is expected to reach $4.9 trillion in value by 2025, according to Refinitiv’s Islamic Finance Development Indicator. A number of other fintech players are seeking to tap into the halal money space, including Zoya and Niyah.

Technology

Former Google, Meta executives raise $100 million for high-capacity AI servers startup

Published

1 hour ago

November 10, 2025

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Former Google, Meta executives raise 0 million for high-capacity AI servers startup

Ofer Shacham is CEO of Majestic Labs.

Tal Givony

Three former Meta and Google silicon executives on Monday announced they’ve raised a total of $100 million to build technology they say will reduce cloud companies’ spend on data center buildouts.

Called Majestic Labs, the startup’s co-founders are Ofer Shacham, Sha Rabii and Masumi Reynders, all of whom spent years working together leading silicon products at Meta and Google. Majestic’s patent-pending silicon design architecture includes 1,000 times the memory of a typical enterprise-grade server, the co-founders told CNBC.

Majestic develops its entire chip system, much like Nvidia, but each of the startup’s servers may replace up to 10 of today’s leading racks, they said.

The company closed its $71 million Series A funding round in September, led by Bow Wave Capital. Among its others investors is Lux Capital. Prior to Monday’s announcement, the co-founders had been quietly working on the startup since late 2023.

Majestic’s funding announcement comes as major tech companies raise their capital expenditures, primarily for data center infrastructure. Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon each lifted their guidance for capital expenditures in October, and they collectively expect that number to reach more than $380 billion this year.

While the majority of large language models and AI workloads have relied on Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, more companies are entering the fold. Google last week announced Ironwood, its latest tensor processing unit, or TPUs, which artificial intelligence startup Anthropic plans to use for its Claude model.

Sha Rabii is Majestic Labs President. Rabii used to lead Google’s silicon efforts.

Google

However, memory capacity remains a challenge for companies that have large amounts of data to process, which the Majestic co-founders said they hope to address.

“Nvidia makes excellent GPUs and has driven incredible AI innovation,” Shacham, Majestic’s CEO, told CNBC. “We’re not trying to replace GPUs across the board — we’re solving for memory-intensive AI workloads where the fixed compute-to-memory ratio becomes a constraint”

Majestic is going after hyperscalers and large companies that run AI models, including those from the financial and pharmaceutical industries, the co-founders said.

The technology underpinning the company includes patent-pending architectures that allow Majestic to collapse multiple racks worth of conventional equipment and memory into a single server. Majestic claims that will allow for a smaller footprint and requires less power and cooling, helping the company’s clients reduce their data center costs.

Prototypes of Majestic’s box servers will be available for some customers in 2027, and the startup has already begun discussing pre-orders, the co-founders said. Majestic declined to share its clients.

The company has fewer than 50 employees — half of which are based in Tel Aviv, Israel, while the rest are based in Los Altos, California. Majestic said it plans to grow each location and seek additional funding in the coming year.

Always in the periphery

The trio met at Google, and together, they helped stand up the team working on Google’s TPUs.

“We’d been building AI for DARPA, for Google, for Meta, but suddenly AI became this ubiquitous thing that everybody needs,” Shacham said. “Every large company needs AI, and that was a good time for me to say ‘How about we go and do that?'”

The first to join the search company was Reynders in 2003, who went to Google as a senior corporate counsel. She’s now Majestic’s COO and manages the business side of the company.

At Google, her teams were focused on business development and product strategy focused on silicon. Reynders spent 15 years at Google, where she rose to director of product management and silicon.

Rabii, Majestic’s president, earned his doctorate from Stanford University, and in 2011, he sold his last chip design company, Arda Technologies, to Google, where he rose to senior director of engineering. Under Rabii, Google launched its video chip Argos, which is used in YouTube’s data centers.

Shacham sold his company, Chip Genesis, to Google in August 2013, when Rabii was leading Google’s silicon team. Chip Genesis’s technology was used broadly across many products including the AI accelerators in Google’s Pixel smartphones. At Google, Shacham rose to head of silicon design and implementation for consumer hardware.

Majestic Labs chief operating officer and co-founder Masumi Reynders

Sharyce Rains

The three of them left Google in 2018 for the company then known as Facebook. There, they built the Facebook Agile Silicon Team, known as “FAST,” within the company’s Reality Labs hardware division. Shacham rose to vice president and head of FAST.

When Meta laid off employees from Reality Labs in 2023, Shacham had to conduct the cuts, he said. At that point, Meta was trying to conserve cash, he said.

“Part of that was layoffs across the organization, and FAST was not excluded from that,” Shacham said. “It’s not a good place to be, not a good feeling to do.”

The three founded Majestic Labs after brainstorming about the biggest bottleneck problems for silicon and AI.

“We’ve been friends and colleagues for a long time, so this notion of working together and doing something exciting has always been in the periphery,” Reynders said.

As Majestic eyes growth and hiring in 2026, the co-founders said they’re tapping into their collective of rolodex of the more than 1,500 employees they’ve worked with at prior companies, including Meta and Google.

“There’s that trust they already have with us,” Rabii said of the former colleagues.

WATCH: Google opens access to its most powerful AI chip

Technology

Government shutdown update, the market’s rough week, PitchBook’s AI tool and more in Morning Squawk

Published

2 hours ago

November 10, 2025

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Government shutdown update, the market's rough week, PitchBook's AI tool and more in Morning Squawk

Tourists walk past the U.S. Capitol more than a month into the continuing U.S. government shutdown in Washington, D.C., U.S., Nov. 7, 2025.

Nathan Howard | Reuters

This is CNBC’s Morning Squawk newsletter. Subscribe here to receive future editions in your inbox.

Here are five key things investors need to know to start the trading day:

1. Light at the end of the tunnel?

All eyes were on Capitol Hill last night when the Senate approved the first step of a deal that could end the federal government shutdown. Effects of the 41-day closure escalated in the last week, as the FAA ordered airlines to cancel some flights and as the Trump administration refused to fund food stamps.

Here’s the latest:

A group of eight Democratic Senators broke with party leadership to vote yes on the agreement that would fund the government through January. The procedural measure passed with a vote count of 60-40.
The package doesn’t include an extension for enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits, which Democrats made a lightning-rod issue during the shutdown. However, it contains a guarantee by Republicans for a vote on the matter next month.
The measure’s passage sets up more votes on the agreement starting today. The House of Representatives and President Donald Trump will also need to sign off on the deal to officially end the shutdown, which is now the longest in American history.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned earlier Sunday that U.S. air travel would be slowed to “a trickle” ahead of Thanksgiving after the Trump administration ordered the cancellation of hundreds of flights amid the shutdown.
The Department of Agriculture, meanwhile, told states not to issue full SNAP benefits for this month and said it would slap penalties on any that didn’t “undo” full payments already made.
The Supreme Court on Friday temporarily paused a federal judge’s order directing the Trump administration to fully fund food stamps for November.

2. Bridge over troubled water

Traders works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

NYSE

Stocks are coming off a rough week, with the Nasdaq Composite recording its biggest weekly loss since April. Several well-known tech names including Oracle, Advanced Micro Devices and Broadcom weighed down the broader market, raising alarm about the health of the artificial intelligence trade.

But stock futures are higher this morning after the Senate’s vote gave traders hope that the end of the shutdown is in sight. It’s a light week for economic data and corporate earnings, which CNBC’s Sarah Min notes could allow space for some digestion of recent market action.

Follow live markets updates here.

3. PitchBook’s pitch

Thomas Fuller | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Startup data provider PitchBook announced this morning that it’s launching a new artificial intelligence tool called PitchBook Navigator.

Beginning later this month, subscribers will be able to get insights on market deals and trends by asking the AI assistant questions. PitchBook is also integrating its product with ChatGPT.

As CNBC’s Jaures Yip points out, the new AI-powered tool comes amid a boom of interest in private market deals as the valuations of buzzy startups balloon.

4. Foul ball

Emmanuel Clase #48 of the Cleveland Guardians pitches during the game between the Cleveland Guardians and the Kansas City Royals at Kauffman Stadium on Saturday, July 26, 2025 in Kansas City, Missouri.

Tanner Gatlin | Major League Baseball | Getty Images

Cleveland Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz were indicted for their alleged roles in a sports betting scheme, federal prosecutors said yesterday. Authorities said the pair took bribes to rig bets on pitches thrown during MLB games.

The duo could face up to 20 years in prison if they are found guilty of the highest-offense charges. The MLB placed both players on leave in July as the league conducted an investigation.

It’s the latest betting scandal to rock major league sports after the federal government said in an indictment last month that confidential information about NBA players was leaked to bettors.

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5. What millionaires want

Cg Tan | E+ | Getty Images

New data shows it might be more lucrative to help a millionaire work out than handle their money.

Professional network Long Angle found that about 1 in 5 millionaires are planning to axe their wealth advisors, and that only a third use one for financial planning. On the other hand, millionaires reported high satisfaction levels with their personal trainers and therapists, as well as with private schools for their kids.

Click here to read which services this group is most and least satisfied with.

The Daily Dividend

Here are some key releases we’re keeping an eye on this week. Some economic data could not come out as scheduled depending on the government shutdown.

— CNBC’s Dan Mangan, Emily Wilkins, Sarah Min, Leslie Josephs, Jeff Cox, Sean Conlon, Jaures Yip, Ian Thomas and Robert Frank contributed to this report. Josephine Rozzelle edited this edition.

Technology

As private tech market heats up, PitchBook makes startup data available via ChatGPT

Published

2 hours ago

November 10, 2025

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As private tech market heats up, PitchBook makes startup data available via ChatGPT

Thomas Fuller | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

The private tech market has never been hotter, with companies like OpenAI, SpaceX, Anthropic and Stripe climbing to astronomical valuations.

PitchBook, one of the top providers of data on startups, wants to make it easier for users to quickly access information on those companies and many others. On Monday, Pitchbook introduced an artificial intelligence-powered tool that provides market insights based on user prompts.

Rather than having to find a company’s profile page and search for specific information, subscribers will be able to ask questions to the AI assistant, dubbed PitchBook Navigator, and get facts and figures on deals and market trends. The company is also integrating with OpenAI, allowing paid users to access information directly through ChatGPT.

The insights are generated using PitchBook’s data and a combination of AI and human expertise. Navigator will become available to subscribers in late November.

“AI is transforming every corner of business, and after nearly two decades building the foundation of reliable, comprehensive data, PitchBook is uniquely positioned to lead this new era of private market intelligence,” said Thomas Van Buskirk, the company’s executive vice president of technology and engineering, in a press release.

PitchBook is rolling out the AI enhancement at a time when investors are clamoring for access to private market deals and data. OpenAI reached a $500 billion valuation in October to become the world’s most valuable private company, topping SpaceX’s reported $400 billion valuation from a secondary sale. Anthropic announced a funding round in September at a $183 billion valuation.

Traditional financial firms are aggressively buying their way into the private market. Charles Schwab agreed last week to acquire Forge Global, a marketplace for pre-IPO shares, for $660 million. In October, Goldman Sachs bought out $7 billion venture capital firm Industry Ventures, while Morgan Stanley announced that it would acquire private shares platform EquityZen.

For PitchBook, ChatGPT marks the latest addition to its large language model integrations. In late October, the company teamed up with Anthropic to make its private market data available directly within Claude for subscribers.

WATCH: Charles Schwab CEO on $660 million Forge acquisition