Dubai – Sharikat Mubasher: Wafr, a UAE-based fintech developing a global Shariah-compliant financial platform, announced securing a pre-seed funding round alongside the launch of WafrChain, a blockchain-based platform designed to facilitate the issuance and management of sukuk.

As per a recent press release, this round attracted individual investors, including Coen Jonker, co-founder of Tyme Group and former executive at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and Neal Cross, co-founder of PictureWealth and former Chief Innovation Officer at DBS Bank.

WafrChain uses a private, permissioned blockchain to connect institutions involved in the sukuk lifecycle, providing a shared record of financial instruments and automating processes such as profit distributions through smart contracts. The platform supports settlements in fiat currencies and stablecoins, with transaction finality reaching 300 milliseconds.

The company aims to address operational complexities in sukuk issuance, which typically involves multiple intermediaries and can take several months or more than a year to complete.

Wafr plans to expand beyond sukuk tokenization into fund tokenization, trade finance, tokenized deposits, and cross-border financial services.