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I lead Cur8 Capital, IFG's investment platform. IFG helps educate 4m+ sharia-sensitive…
Articles by Ibrahim
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Ibrahim Khan shared thisI only speak to my children in Urdu. Some people find this surprising. We live in England. They get homeschooled in English. Their friends speak English. But I think multilingual parents who default to English-only at home are doing their children a massive disservice. I've seen it happen slowly across British Pakistani, British Indian, British Bangladeshi families. English creeps in because it's easier. Because parents worry their kids will fall behind. And gradually the mother tongue fades out. My children will need to talk to their grandparents, who are more comfortable in Urdu. To family in Pakistan who they can actually have a real conversation with, not one mediated through awkward translation. And one day, when they have children of their own, they will want to pass on that tradition too. And by that time if they are clueless on urdu, its too late. But it goes deeper than that. Urdu doesn't just use different words. It has different structures of respect, different emotional registers, different ways of expressing love and frustration and humour. My children access a richer world because of it. A whole different way of thinking that English simply can't replicate. The research backs this up too. Bilingual children consistently outperform monolingual peers in task-switching, attentional control, and cognitive flexibility. It literally reshapes how the brain develops. If you speak a second language at home, speak it to your children. The English will take care of itself. Schools, friends, television, the internet. English is inescapable. The mother tongue only survives if you actively protect it.
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Ibrahim Khan shared thisIncredible to see Yusuf Sherwani, M.D. and team execute flawlessly year after year.Ibrahim Khan shared thisMore money than ever is going into mental health. Are we getting our money's worth? Over the last decade, employers invested heavily, often by carving mental health out into a real benefit. They expanded access, normalized asking for help, and put support on the table for millions. Then the bill came due. Mental health is now a top-five driver of commercial health spend, growing 4x faster than overall healthcare costs. More therapy, more sessions, more access, and outcomes have barely moved. Here's the uncomfortable part. The model is working exactly as designed. The system routes almost everyone to the same answer: therapy with a clinician, regardless of what they actually need. According to SAMHSA, nearly half of adults receiving mental health treatment don't meet criteria for a diagnosable condition in a given year. Many get more support than their situation calls for, the people in genuine crisis can't get enough, and no one in the loop is paid on whether anyone gets better. That's not a spending problem. It's a care allocation problem. I know, because we spent a decade proving the other way works, in substance use, the hardest corner of behavioral health. We matched care to need, brought the cost of treating someone from roughly $30,000 to less than $3,000, and put 100% of our fees at risk on outcomes and ROI. The structural problems we see in mental health are the same ones we faced early in substance use: a delivery model that rewards billable sessions over outcomes, deep unmet need in high-acuity populations, and incentives with no clear line of sight to ROI. Today we're introducing Sona, a new voice in mental health. It's there in the everyday moments a 45-minute session was never built to reach. It works under the supervision of our clinicians, and when someone needs more than it should handle, it gets them to a human. That's the point: Sona takes on what doesn't need a clinician, so clinical capacity reaches the people who do, without inflating healthcare costs. The question isn't whether the mental health system will change. It's whether we use what's now possible to prop up the old model or finally build the right one. Meet Sona → sona.pelagohealth.com
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Ibrahim Khan shared thisYou can be fully in-person, five days a week, and still have a team that doesn't really know each other. The whole office debate is really just a proxy for a deeper question. What is the optimal mixture of interactions between colleagues that creates the most value? Offsites are a massive, overlooked part of that equation. We've been running offsites at Cur8 for a few years now and we've learned a lot about what works. Early on, we packed the agenda. Strategy sessions back to back. Breakout groups. Presentations. We treated it like a compressed board meeting with nicer food. Then we realised this isn't the place to do strategy. You don't have that much time. And actually the key thing is just interacting with other people. So we stripped the schedule right back. Now every offsite has a theme relevant to where we are as a business. We run through some key updates, get people thinking along the right lines. But the bulk of the time is just being around each other. Eating together. Having conversations that would never happen over Zoom. We used to book out the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and get 20 people in there. But the team's grown, and at a certain point an offsite stops being an offsite and starts being a conference. So now we run two back-to-back over different weekends, 15-20 people each. More quality time with actual humans. And the impact back at work is tangible. You realise these people are your friends. Giving feedback becomes easier because there's a safety net of genuine relationship underneath. You know they'll take it well, positive and negative, and that just makes everything more open and honest. And people who never interact day to day start talking. That connectivity across the business matters more than any strategy deck. It's all about information flow. If you're fully in-person, offsites still matter. You need a different environment to unlock a different type of interaction. If you're remote or hybrid, they matter even more. Would love to hear from people who've done memorable offsites. What made them great? What would you do differently?
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Ibrahim Khan shared thisWe don't realise it, but our government is literally paying billions to fund American growth and British stagnation. The UK puts roughly £70 billion a year into tax relief to incentivise long-term investment by British pension funds. The problem is where that money ends up. 25 years ago, UK pension funds allocated over 50% to British equities. Today that number is under 5%. Australia's pension funds put 40% into domestic markets. Japan almost 50%. The US over 60%. Britain is a global outlier. British savers, subsidised by British taxpayers, funding American companies. Meanwhile, British startups are struggling to raise. British infrastructure is crumbling. Productivity has flatlined. We spent two decades trying to get tech giants to pay their fair share in the UK and largely failed. The next two decades will be harder. These companies are only getting more powerful and more globally mobile. Chasing tax revenue from companies designed to avoid it is a losing game. The capital we need to redirect is already in our hands. More allocation to private markets. More incentives for UK-focused funds. A serious conversation about whether it makes sense for public pension money to be overwhelmingly deployed overseas. Our whole thesis at Cur8 is that there are brilliant opportunities in UK private markets that never see the capital they deserve because the system is wired to funnel everything toward US public equities. We're actively working to change that. We need to wake up and smell the coffee: The USA isn't going to fix this for us. We will need to do it ourselves. And we have the money - it just need to go to the right places.
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Ibrahim Khan shared thisPakistan bought F-16 fighter jets from America. But if there's a war, they can't use them. They own the hardware. They don't own the permission. A lot of early-stage startups work the same way. Someone else's licence. Someone else's regulatory permissions. Someone else's compliance framework. It speeds you up. On the surface it looks great. But the incentives are completely misaligned. The licence holder wants minimal risk and a steady fixed payment. They don't want you growing aggressively or pushing into new territory. Your growth is their liability. As a startup, you want to move fast, experiment, and scale. That's the whole point. At Cur8, we started out operating under someone else's regulatory umbrella. It's the standard playbook. Faster to get going, less upfront cost. But over time, you realise you don't fully control that part of the business. Someone else's risk appetite shapes your decisions. So we made the deliberate decision to pursue our own FCA licences. It's not quick and it's not cheap. But the payoff is real. We save somewhere between $100,000 and $200,000 per year in overheads on each licence. We have greater control over how we run that part of the business. And ultimately, it's better for our investors. Sovereignty is expensive upfront. But renting someone else's infrastructure has a hidden cost that compounds over time. If you can't use the fighter jet when it actually matters, you don't really own it.
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Ibrahim Khan shared thisI'm a terrible swimmer, so the idea of kayaking in front of colleagues is not my idea of "fun". But that's exactly where I ended up last week. I did contemplate my life choices that morning as I was pushed from shore. But once you're in the kayak and paddling, something shifts. Your arms burn after 10 minutes. You're convinced you're doing it wrong. But you settle into it. And it's actually quite fun. And then the thing you were most scared of - falling in - actually happens. You surface, the water's freezing. But you're fine. And weirdly, after that, you paddle with way more confidence. The worst-case scenario already happened and it was survivable. I've noticed that pattern in almost everything worth doing. The nerve-wracking part is always before. Once you're actually in it, sure, it's hard work. But the fear shrinks. And the thing you built up in your head as catastrophic turns out to be uncomfortable, but survivable. Sometimes even fun. Building Cur8 has felt like that over and over again. Every big decision that kept me up at night, every leap that felt reckless in the moment. The fear before was always worse than the reality after. And the confidence from surviving each one compounded into the next. You just have to get in the kayak. And the cherry on the cake? Mohsin Patel fell in. Watching your co-founder surface from a river looking like a confused otter made the entire offsite worth it.
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Ibrahim Khan shared thisIncredible to see Eamon Jubbawy execute. Proud to be a small part of the journey.Ibrahim Khan shared thisIsometric has raised $40 million in Series A financing from AVP, Plural, Lowercarbon Capital, and legendary venture investors John Doerr and Walter Kortschak. Heavy industry is back. Across manufacturing, power generation, data centers, waste management, and more—the industrial economy is seeing a resurgence. But every industrial project needs to be certified against regulatory, safety, and sustainability standards. Until now, certification involved a tradeoff: Do it fast, or do it right. Never both. Isometric is the world’s first AI-native certification company, deploying AI agents to make the certification process instant and invisible, unleashing the potential of the industrial economy. We proved it in carbon removal—where we’re now the largest certifier globally, contracted across 200+ projects by the likes of Microsoft, Anglo American, and Boeing—and are doing the same for energy, fuel, and building materials. Now we’re bringing agentic certification to the rest of the industrial economy. Richard Tyler told our story in The Times: https://lnkd.in/e_QxNsKm
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Ibrahim Khan shared thisThere was a man with a large weapon who roamed Edinburgh, injured 5 people and terrorised mosques and businesses. Remember the wall to wall coverage of the Jewish ambulances set aflame? Why is this story so insignificant for the BBC? And they've not even included the video where the man explains why he did this "Muslim bas****s raping our daughters. Enough is enough!" You can watch that here: https://lnkd.in/e_zyxuYY Religous and racial hatred should be covered equally and impartially with no political bias. That's all we should ask for and expect from the BBC we all fund.
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Ibrahim Khan reposted thisIbrahim Khan reposted thisThis weekend we're filming a Q&A - and we want YOUR questions. 🎙️ We're answering anything you throw at us! No topic off the table: 💰 Halal Finance & Investing 🏢 Business 👥 The real lives of Ibrahim & Mohsin 💍 Marriage 🚀 Building IFG (400k+ followers) & Cur8 Capital ($240m+ AUM) …and honestly, anything else you've been wanting to ask. Drop your questions in the comments 👇 The best ones get answered this weekend.
Ibrahim Khan replied to a comment
5d
Umair Aslam you're welcome.
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Ibrahim Khan liked thisIbrahim Khan liked thisOne thing I’ve committed to this year is doing one LP check each quarter for an emerging manager and then giving them my full support in any way I can. This quarter, that manager was Rick (Jingchun) Hao from Ruya Ventures. It’s been incredible watching up close as he’s built the firm and raised his first fund. We’ve also had the chance to co-invest together and I’ve come away deeply impressed. Rick has many of the attributes I think matter most in building a generational venture firm: intellectual curiosity, a differentiated perspective, humility, and an exceptional ability to learn quickly. He’s investing across frontier technologies, from batteries and semiconductors to robotics, AI and next-generation compute. Congratulations, Rick, on an incredible milestone. Excited to see what you and Ruya Ventures build over the next decade. https://lnkd.in/er67DTq3Ex-Speedinvest partner Rick Hao closes $50m solo GP fund for deeptech startupsEx-Speedinvest partner Rick Hao closes $50m solo GP fund for deeptech startups
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Ibrahim Khan liked thisIbrahim Khan liked thisBREAKING 🇸🇦: Tabby | تابي has secured both Consumer Finance and SME Finance licences from the Saudi Central Bank – SAMA. Tabby started as a buy-now, pay-later platform. With 25 million registered users and 65,000+ business partners across the GCC, it is already one of the region's most widely adopted fintech products. These two licences mark the moment it becomes something more than that. The Consumer Finance licence allows Tabby to offer financing of up to SAR 50,000 (~$13k) over 12 months. This moves it into the kind of high-value purchases that BNPL was never designed for: furnishing a home, booking a holiday, funding a course, purchasing a used vehicle. Early merchant partners include noon, IKEA, وقت اللياقة - Fitness Time, Almosafer, flynas, and Almanea Co. Critically, all financing is structured on a Shariah-compliant Murabaha model, with a fixed cost disclosed upfront, no compounding charges, and no late fees. Tabby previously graduated from SAMA's regulatory sandbox before receiving its BNPL licence in 2025. Obtaining consumer and SME finance licences requires meeting SAMA's full compliance, security, and customer protection standards. Tabby is no longer competing with other BNPL platforms. It is competing with consumer finance providers, banks, and business lending products. The addressable market has expanded significantly. Saudi Arabia is one of the region's fastest-growing fintech markets, with Vision 2030 explicitly targeting a diversified consumer finance ecosystem. 👀 Interested in MENA tech & startups? Sign up to my weekly newsletter here: https://lnkd.in/dJMzb8Tt in partnership with CapQuest. #MENA #startup #vc
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Ibrahim Khan liked thisIbrahim Khan liked thisToday I met the President of Uzbekistan. I moved to SF exactly 2 years ago. In my wildest dreams I never thought we’d be here. 2024 summer: Headstarter goes viral. We get 60k users within a month. Unknown at the time, some of those users were engineers who’d later join Google, and who were Uzbek diaspora. 2025 summer: Powell St becomes a legit community, minting 10 companies into YC/Speedrun. I become an a16z Speedrun scout thanks to Robin Guo. Senator Alisher and I meet at Stanford. We talk big dreams. Sardor (pictured below) becomes yet another roommate to get into YC. Back home, Sardor becomes a national hero… the first Uzbek to get into YC. Fast forward to spring 2026: me and five Powell roommates visit Uzbekistan for the first time. Senator Alisher and I catch up again on startups in Uzbekistan. I come back a second time with my good friend Tariq (first hire at a $200 billion company). We both invest in a startup here, “The Car Go” by Ziyobek, a Yoshlar Ventures and UzCombinator portfolio company. Today, Senator Alisher introduced me to the President of Uzbekistan, Shavkat Mirziyoyev. More on this soon. This is a crazy ride and I’m thankful for my parents, friends, and team members who got us here. Always take that bet on yourself. Give it time. Things will compound.
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Ibrahim Khan liked thisGreat to see Joseph Saxby and the team at Spruce featured in Balderton’s #BuiltInEurope campaign. Decarbonizing homes is a massive challenge, and Spruce is providing the essential infrastructure to help installers scale. Proud to be backing them at Cur8 Capital as they streamline the transition to net zero.Ibrahim Khan liked thisHeat pumps need to go into millions of homes this decade. Heat pumps work brilliantly, but the installers who actually do the work are drowning in admin & manual processes. That's why Spruce exists. One platform to run a heat pump business – enquiry to handover, new build & retrofit, building physics modelling, conversion rate optimisation.. the lot. Over 750 installers run their business on Spruce today. And we're only just getting started. It turns out that if you properly solve the complexity of heat pumps, you’re pretty well placed to address everything else that an installation business needs… Great to be featured in Balderton's #BuiltInEurope campaign, alongside some pretty stellar founders. Europe gets a bad rap (sometimes legitimately!) but there's nowhere better to be building Spruce 🌲 🚀 PS. We're growing fast and hiring across design, engineering, & commercial – come build with us @ spruce.eco/careers 👈 builtineurope.com #BuiltInEurope
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Ibrahim Khan liked thisIbrahim Khan liked thisMore money than ever is going into mental health. Are we getting our money's worth? Over the last decade, employers invested heavily, often by carving mental health out into a real benefit. They expanded access, normalized asking for help, and put support on the table for millions. Then the bill came due. Mental health is now a top-five driver of commercial health spend, growing 4x faster than overall healthcare costs. More therapy, more sessions, more access, and outcomes have barely moved. Here's the uncomfortable part. The model is working exactly as designed. The system routes almost everyone to the same answer: therapy with a clinician, regardless of what they actually need. According to SAMHSA, nearly half of adults receiving mental health treatment don't meet criteria for a diagnosable condition in a given year. Many get more support than their situation calls for, the people in genuine crisis can't get enough, and no one in the loop is paid on whether anyone gets better. That's not a spending problem. It's a care allocation problem. I know, because we spent a decade proving the other way works, in substance use, the hardest corner of behavioral health. We matched care to need, brought the cost of treating someone from roughly $30,000 to less than $3,000, and put 100% of our fees at risk on outcomes and ROI. The structural problems we see in mental health are the same ones we faced early in substance use: a delivery model that rewards billable sessions over outcomes, deep unmet need in high-acuity populations, and incentives with no clear line of sight to ROI. Today we're introducing Sona, a new voice in mental health. It's there in the everyday moments a 45-minute session was never built to reach. It works under the supervision of our clinicians, and when someone needs more than it should handle, it gets them to a human. That's the point: Sona takes on what doesn't need a clinician, so clinical capacity reaches the people who do, without inflating healthcare costs. The question isn't whether the mental health system will change. It's whether we use what's now possible to prop up the old model or finally build the right one. Meet Sona → sona.pelagohealth.com
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Ibrahim Khan liked thisIbrahim Khan liked thisBack in Westminster on Monday, for Equi's second parliamentary launch this month. This time with a focus on Islamic and ethical finance - how can alternative finance help promote economic growth, advance financial inclusion and prevent poverty? It was a pleasure to present the report's key findings and policy recommendations, and hear from experts in the field. Fantastic to see the room packed full of people with an interest in the topic, and grateful for keynote speeches and messages of support from HM Treasury Chief Secretary Lucy Rigby KC MP, Naz Shah MP, Afzal Khan CBE MP, Shockat Adam MP, Sarah Owen MP, Yasmin Qureshi, Abtisam Mohamed MP. Thank you also to the Equi team, partners and friends, without whom this work wouldn't be possible - Bushra Nasir CBE DL FCCT, Prof Javed Khan OBE, Amaan Qureshi, Dr Mary Hunter, Safa Al-Azami, Amna Farooq, Ruwayda Shariff, Rehan Ansari, Tahir Abbas, Tariq Modood, Fatima Husain, Sarah Joseph, Yunis Alam, Omar Shaikh, Sultan Choudhury OBE, Umer Suleman, Omar Khaliel, Ibrahim Khan, Sannah Khan, Mukhtar Karim
Experience & Education
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Cur8 Capital
View Ibrahim’s full experience
See their title, tenure and more.
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Volunteer Experience
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Visiting Imam at British Muslim Heritage Centre
BRITISH MUSLIM HERITAGE CENTRE
- Present 11 years 11 months
Education
Delivering Friday sermons, other ad-hoc speaking duties
Languages
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Urdu
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Arabic
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English
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