IMAN Holdings plans $100m raise for AI Islamic banking GCC push
IMAN Holdings, a Central Asia-based fintech founded in 2020, has announced plans to raise $100 million to expand its AI-powered Islamic banking platform into the Gulf Cooperation Council. The company says its platform currently serves more than one million registered users and manages assets exceeding $100 million, having previously raised over $10 million from international investors.
The planned raise is framed as a growth round rather than a venture fundraise; IMAN has not disclosed lead investors, a target close date, or the instrument type for the $100 million. The company has set an internal target of growing assets under management to more than $250 million by the end of 2026.
The platform
IMAN's mobile-first platform combines savings, investment, payments and financial guidance in a single application, built around Sharia compliance as a core product feature rather than an add-on. The company says compliance checks are performed in real time and made visible to users, which it positions as a differentiator in markets where trust in the legitimacy of Islamic finance products is a purchasing factor.
The AI layer is designed to move the product beyond static dashboards toward conversational, adaptive interfaces. Rustam Rahmatov, founder and group chief executive, said the problem with banking has never been availability but the way it was built: "It was never designed to understand what people actually want." Co-founder and chief risk and data officer Shakhzod Shukurov added that future banks will anticipate needs rather than merely react to them, doing so "with user consent and with the highest degree of transparency and care."
Beyond the consumer application, IMAN says it is developing infrastructure that would allow financial institutions to launch their own AI-powered, Sharia-compliant products, including RegTech tooling and white-label banking services designed for cross-market deployment.
Market context
The global Islamic finance industry is estimated to hold assets above $4 trillion, with a significant portion concentrated in the GCC and South-east Asia. It remains an underserved segment in digital-first services: most incumbent Islamic banks operate on legacy core-banking platforms originally designed for conventional finance, creating an opening for mobile-native challengers.
The GCC is a logical expansion market for IMAN. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait have each published national fintech strategies and maintain dedicated regulatory sandboxes for Islamic fintech. The UAE's ADGM and Dubai's DIFC financial free zones both offer Sharia-finance licensing frameworks that can accelerate market entry for a foreign-incorporated fintech.
Competition in the space is growing. A number of well-funded regional and international startups are pursuing the same mobile-first Islamic finance opportunity, alongside digital arms of established Islamic banks in Saudi Arabia and Malaysia. IMAN's Central Asian user base provides proof of platform scale, but GCC regulators will apply distinct licensing, capital adequacy and consumer-protection requirements that may lengthen the go-to-market timeline.
The use of behavioural data for predictive financial guidance also carries regulatory weight. As the EU AI Act's provisions for general-purpose AI systems phase in and the UAE's own AI governance framework matures, platforms that process financial behaviour data at scale will face increasing scrutiny around explainability, consent architecture and cross-border data flows. IMAN's stated commitment to transparency and user consent positions it well for that scrutiny, though no third-party certification or regulatory approval has been disclosed.