Seed round · Qualified investors only
The endowment does not exist yet. Neither does the company that will run it.
digiwaqf is a perpetual Islamic endowment for Muslim tech founders: its corpus is never spent, and only the yield funds grants and interest-free loans. A separate company, Ummah 21st Century (U21C), will run the platform and advise the endowment. That company is what an investor can own part of. The endowment is not, ever. Neither entity is incorporated. There is no fatwa, no licence, no corpus and no product users.
Counterparty today · EVA DAVA EOOD, BurgasConverts into U21C only · never into the WaqfPrivate placement · not a public offer
What you would own a piece of
U21C is the company. The Waqf is the endowment.
Ummah 21st Century (U21C) — DIFC
Owns and operates the digiwaqf platform. Carries the AML/KYC obligations and the personal data. Advises the Waqf on where its corpus is invested (conservative Islamic instruments: sukuk, Islamic ETFs, low-risk). Earns contractual fees for that work. A normal for-profit company, and the only thing a SAFE ever converts into.
The Waqf — Labuan
A perpetual endowment. Its corpus is irrevocable and never spent. The yield funds Muslim tech founders through grants and interest-free loans. No investor owns any part of it, ever. That separation is the whole structure, and it is deliberate.
Before anything else
Qualified investors only.
The SAFE is offered privately, to qualified investors, against your own jurisdiction’s test. This page is not an offer. If that is not you, the rest of this page is not for you, and the door back to the endowment itself is at the bottom.
- The checkbox on our form is an intake signal, not a qualification. We verify status against evidence and clear KYC/AML before any money is accepted and before you appear in the registry.
- Funds must arrive from an account in your own name. No third-party payments, no cash — which is why there is no card button anywhere on this page.
- Terms are discussed after qualification, privately. That is why you will not find a price, a discount or a cap here.
The diligence file
Sixteen drafts, published in full before anyone answered them.
Every legal document this project has is public and complete, including the two that gate it. The fatwa requestis 34 questions to the Shariah Supervisory Board asking whether this structure is permissible — including whether U21C’s own revenue model is. The counsel package is 43 questions to our own lawyers across three tracks, listing the places we believe we are exposed, in our words.
Both are working drafts under review. Sending them is the first milestone this round funds, and the date is a line item, not a hope. You are reading them at the same time as the people we wrote them for.
Two of them ask whether things we say elsewhere on this site are legally sound. We left the questions in.
- The fatwa request — 34 questions to the Shariah Board →
- The SAFE itself — form of agreement →
- Risk disclosure — read this one →
- Qualification, KYC, AML — what we need from you →
- How your holding is recorded →
- What you get back once payment lands →
- Governing law: DIFC + DIAC arbitration →
There is no traction here and no licence to point at. The diligence file is what exists. The full package, including the Shariah governance charter, is at /legal. Open it.
Before you go further
The risk in plain words
This is early stage and the project may not happen. U21C does not exist yet: until it is incorporated your counterparty is EVA DAVA EOOD, an ordinary Bulgarian company with other, unrelated businesses. The SAFE converts into equity of U21C only, never into the Waqf, and it may never convert at all. It is illiquid, pays no interest, no dividend and no repayment. You can lose everything you put in. This page is not an offer of securities and not investment advice. digiwaqf is pre-launch: not yet a licensed waqf, not Shariah-certified. Read the full risk disclosure.
The round
$350,000, and what it buys.
$0 raised of $350,000, in public. This is the model’s number, not a number we put beside it. Open the model below and it computes $350,000 from its own curve: a trough of $296,954 in month 48, plus a 15% buffer. Counting the other way — from quotes rather than from the curve — our council reached $350–400k for the same list. Two routes, one answer.
It holds only while U21C needs no DFSA licence. Under the licensed structure the same model asks $800,000 — locked capital, DIFC infrastructure, four mandated roles. Which one applies turns on a question our counsel has not answered. We would rather show you that unresolved than round it off.
- Send the fatwa request and the counsel package — the two documents above, and the first milestone
- Register the waqf in Labuan
- Incorporate U21C in the jurisdiction that fits its role
- Build the platform to a working crowdfund
- Fund the Road-Show — the largest line, and the one below
Where the corpus comes from
The corpus is raised in person, and that is the job this round funds.
U21C is paid a fee on a corpus. Today the corpus is zero, so the first thing U21C is built to do is go and ask for one. Once the Labuan waqf is registered and the fatwa is in hand, the founder takes the structure to the endowment donors of the Muslim world and asks them to seed it: the Gulf, Malaysia, Indonesia, Türkiye, the UK. Family offices, awqaf boards, zakat institutions. Meetings, not campaigns.
We will not tell you what that raises. Nobody honestly can, and the Board has not yet ruled on which fees U21C may charge at all. So here is what a seed investor is actually underwriting: a registered waqf, a fatwa in hand, a package that survives a room full of trustees, and a founder who can get into that room. The model below prices the fee question. It does not price the room.
What this block does not yet have, and an investor should ask for: the named targets and the average ticket; who opens the door and what binds them to U21C; and the calendar. Two of those are people rather than documents, and neither is bound to U21C by anything signed today.
The arithmetic
We are not going to tell you the number. Move it.
This section used to hold three revenue scenarios built on a Year-1 corpus of $30M and a 6–8% yield. Both were assumptions from our own vault, and both were labelled as assumptions — but a static chart makes an assumption look like a finding, and these two did not survive being checked. APIF, the Islamic Development Bank’s flagship waqf fund, has raised $115.20M since 2001. Indonesia’s entire state-backed national cash waqf programme has accumulated roughly $190M, ever. And a capital-safe sovereign sukuk yields 4.3–4.7%today, not 6–8%.
So the page states the model instead, names every input, grades each one by how far we actually verified it — including the three we built ourselves with nothing behind them — and hands you the sliders. Which fees U21C may charge is the Board’s to decide, not ours (fatwa request, Q10 and Q11), so that is a slider too.
Trough −$297k at month 48, plus a 15% buffer, and no locked capital. Infrastructure runs $10k/yr before a single salary. Never reaches cash-positive inside six years.
C — the deed fixes the allocation and the ujrah. U21C is nazir, not portfolio manager. Keeps a share of the yield on classical footing.
The waqif writes the portfolio into the waqf deed once — a fixed, conservative allocation — andwrites in the nazir’s remuneration. U21C becomes the nazir-administrator rather than the portfolio manager: a licensed third party executes the written allocation, so U21C exercises no investment discretion. Its ujrah is a share of the benefits, never of the corpus.
Why this is stronger on the Shariah side, not weaker. Q10 asks whether a carry is permissible when the manager bears no capital risk — a hard, open question. A waqif-stipulated ujrah from the benefits is a different and much older question, and the schools answered it long ago.
What this does not do is escape the licence by itself. A constitution that names the strategy is the thing a manager is accountable for, not an exemption from it — the licence is avoided here only because a third party does the managing. This is a question for counsel, not a settled fact.
The corpus — the only input the revenue model has
estimate The first real money. A realistic year-one range is $0.5M–$5M: two to four cheques, post-fatwa, from the founder network. Drag it to 30 to see what this page used to claim.
no source Ours, and nothing supports it. The benchmarks: APIF — the Islamic Development Bank’s flagship waqf fund, created by the IsDB and nine institutions in 2001 — has $115.20M of total subscriptions, about $4.8M a year with a multilateral development bank behind it. Indonesia’s entire national cash waqf programme adds $16–49M a year with a state behind it. Anything that outruns those is a claim, not a plan.
The portfolio
verified Read off the market in July 2026: Qatar 4.25% 10Nov2035 USD sukuk bid YTM 4.66% · UAE retail T-Sukuk 4.3% · Saudi 2029 coupon 4.303% · Malaysia 10Y 3.64%. This page used to say 6–8%. That does not exist on paper that cannot lose its principal — above roughly 5% you are taking currency, duration or equity risk, and whether the corpus may carry that risk at all is a question for the Board.
estimate 0% preserves the corpus in nominal terms; 2.5% preserves what it can buy. Contemporary readings of hifz al-asl lean toward the second, which means part of the yield is never spendable. AAOIFI GS 13 governs waqf structure but sets no investment limits — that mandate is the Board’s to write.
What U21C is paid — the Board decides this, not us
estimate Structure A only. At 2% plus a 20% carry, U21C takes 64% of the waqf’s gross yield and the corpus still loses purchasing power. That is the fee schedule as drafted, and it is exactly what Q10 and Q11 ask about.
estimate Structure A only. Q10 asks whether a carry is permissible at all when the corpus is irrevocable and the manager bears no capital risk. We have not answered it. Neither has the Board.
estimate Structure C only, and it is the waqif’sto set. Malikis and Shafi’is both hold the nazir entitled to a reward from the benefits of the waqf, or to wages promised by the waqif; Imam Nawawi holds a waqif-promised wage good even above ujrat al-mithl. Note it is a share of the benefits, never of the corpus — which is what hifz al-asl requires.
estimate One-time, on deposit — 53–91% of U21C’s revenue, and it does not recur. Whether a fee on a transaction is a regulated activity at all is a question for counsel, and the answer decides whether structures B and C are available.
What the endowment can award
estimate The five applications on the platform ask $15k (idea), $40k and $45k (early seed), $85k and $90k (seed) — a mean of $55k. That ladder is not decoration: the small tickets are Hibah, an outright grant that never comes back, and the big ones are Qard Hasan, an interest-free loan that does. A returning ticket can be lent again, so it does far more work per dollar of corpus — and every default is a permanent loss of corpus, which is the thing the endowment is forbidden to allow. Drag this up for bigger projects and watch how few of them the yield reaches.
Cost
no source Ours, and nothing supports it. Salaries, contractors, travel, Board retainer. Regulatory infrastructure is added on top automatically. There is no headcount plan, no salary and no FTE for anyone in this project — the round implicitly assumes its founders are unpaid, and this slider is where you test that.
no source Ours. No multi-year operating plan exists. This is a line, not a budget.
estimate Itemised: DFSA application $25k · incorporation $8k · Islamic Finance endorsement $5k · Labuan $15–40k · counsel $30–60k · platform $45k. This page used to say $80k.
estimate Structure A only. Not spendable— it sits on the balance sheet as a condition of the licence. Advisory firms are quoted “at least US$150,000 as capital resources”; asset management, “upwards of US$250,000”. Set it to 0 to model a company that does not hold a DFSA licence.
estimate Needs the fatwa, the Labuan registration and the company. This is the most sensitive input on the page: the trough sits before revenue begins, so the fee sliders do not move the seed at all — this one does, at roughly $8,000 a month.
| corpus | revenue | cost | net | grant budget | awards / yr | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| year 2 | $500k | $27k | $88k | −$60k | $17k | 1 every 3.2 yrs |
| year 3 | $1.35M | $51k | $96k | −$45k | $47k | 1 every 1.2 yrs |
| year 4 | $2.79M | $91k | $106k | −$15k | $96k | 1 |
| year 5 | $5.25M | $159k | $116k | $43k | $181k | 3 |
| year 6 | $9.43M | $275k | $128k | $147k | $325k | 5 |
The grant budget is what the endowment can award once U21C and the third-party manager are paid. At a $55k ticket that is 5 in year six. Bigger tickets reach bigger projects and fewer of them — the yield does not care which you pick. A round the community can meaningfully vote on needs somewhere north of $25M of standing corpus. Below that, a ballot over one or two awards a year is a formality rather than governance — which is why the voting mechanic is not on this page yet.
If you have read the documents
Leave a private enquiry.
We reply. If it fits, we arrange a call. The documents are all here, so bring the questions they raised.
Not an investor?
You came to the wrong door, and that is fine.
The endowment itself is at digiwaqf.com. It takes gifts, not investment: no equity, no return, no repayment, and nothing on this page applies to it.