SAN FRANCISCO — Akinda, an emerging values-based stock research platform designed to help investors discover equities that align with their personal faith and principles, has officially established its presence in the United States. Founder and Chief Executive Officer Nurmukhammad Ismoilov has relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area to spearhead the company’s direct expansion into the American market, positioning the startup at the epicenter of the global retail investing ecosystem.
The strategic move brings Akinda directly into the world’s largest retail trading arena. In recent years, millions of everyday Americans have embraced mobile applications to take control of their financial futures, buying and selling stocks with unprecedented ease. Yet, despite this massive surge in retail participation, everyday investors who wish to adhere strictly to Islamic finance principles—or simply want to steer clear of industries that directly conflict with their moral and ethical values—frequently find themselves lacking straightforward, reliable digital tools to inspect the contents of their portfolios.
For many modern investors, knowing what companies lie beneath the surface of a mutual fund, exchange-traded fund, or individual stock holding has become an increasingly complex challenge. Akinda aims to solve this transparency gap by offering sophisticated screening mechanisms tailored to the everyday retail participant.
"The United States is where retail investing is most active, and it is where the demand for values-based tools is growing the fastest," says Ismoilov regarding the company’s North American expansion. "We came here to be close to our users, our partners, and the investors who truly understand this market."
Built for Investors Who Care What They Own
At the core of the company’s offering is Akinda’s specialized Shariah-compliant stock screener, which evaluates more than 15,000 publicly traded equities listed across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. To ensure rigorous compliance standards, each individual stock is carefully reviewed against AAOIFI Shariah Standard No. 21, widely recognized as the preeminent benchmark within the global Islamic finance industry. Through this systematic evaluation, platform users receive a transparent, clear-cut result for every company they analyze, complete with the underlying financial and operational reasons behind the screening outcome.
Beyond simple screening, Akinda integrates practical utilities designed to help faith-conscious investors manage their portfolios comprehensively. The platform includes dedicated tools for dividend purification, enabling users to accurately calculate what portion of their investment income originates from non-compliant activities and determine the exact amount they need to set aside for charitable donation.
Furthermore, the platform allows users to seamlessly connect the mainstream brokerage accounts they already utilize for their daily trading activities—including popular platforms such as Robinhood, Webull, Charles Schwab, and Trading212. By linking these external accounts, investors can screen their entire existing portfolio in one centralized location without needing to migrate their assets or change their preferred brokers.
Organic Growth Without Paid Advertising
Unlike many modern financial technology startups that rely heavily on aggressive venture-backed marketing campaigns and paid digital advertisements to acquire users, Akinda has achieved its current scale entirely through organic search optimization and content-driven growth. To date, the platform has cultivated a dedicated community of approximately 10,000 registered users, while attracting roughly 20,000 monthly visitors to its website.
This growing user base is geographically diverse, reflecting a truly international audience spread across the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, South Korea, Central Asia, and the Middle East. This global footprint demonstrates a widespread, cross-border appetite for accessible financial tools that prioritize ethical screening.
In addition to serving individual retail traders directly, Akinda has built a viable business-to-business revenue stream. The company commercializes its proprietary Shariah screening technology by licensing it to other businesses through an application programming interface, commonly known as an API. Among its early commercial clients is a business based in Texas, a partnership that has provided Akinda with an established operational foothold and commercial experience within the US market well ahead of its official physical expansion.
Integrating Into the Bay Area Startup Ecosystem
Establishing operations in Northern California has placed Akinda squarely within the dynamic Silicon Valley startup community. As part of its integration into the local tech scene, Akinda has participated in the Alchemist & Silkroad Innovation Residency, a specialized program designed to support promising international founders as they scale their ventures in the United States.
Further embedding himself in the regional startup community, Ismoilov recently attended TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco, widely recognized as one of the largest and most influential technology and startup conferences in the world. These milestones build upon a strong foundation of prior institutional support. Earlier in its corporate journey, Akinda received backing and mentorship from prominent startup accelerators and innovation hubs, including Plug and Play, the Alchemist Accelerator, Astana Hub, and IT Park Uzbekistan, alongside securing a prestigious Google for Startups grant.
Bridging the Gap Between Research and Action
With its physical headquarters now established in the San Francisco Bay Area, Akinda’s next major strategic objective in the US market involves closing the operational gap between financial research and direct execution. Currently, the company is actively engaged in partnership discussions with established US brokerage firms. The ultimate goal of these negotiations is to allow platform users to seamlessly screen a stock for compliance and execute a purchase order directly within the Akinda ecosystem, eliminating friction in the user journey.
"Today, an investor finds a halal stock on Akinda and then has to go somewhere else to buy it," Ismoilov notes. "We want that to be one smooth step. That is what American investors expect, and that is what we are building."
American investors interested in exploring the platform can access the service directly at akinda.io.