Two people who spent years running community organizations — and got exhausted by the same broken system everyone else was quietly tolerating.
Here's something nobody talks about: running a mosque is actually really, really hard. Not spiritually hard. Administratively hard.
For years, both Abdul Raqeeb and Vazir were deep in the trenches of community work — serving on boards, managing events, organizing volunteers, and trying to keep the lights on (sometimes literally). The community was beautiful. The work was meaningful. The technology? It was a complete disaster.
"We were managing a sacred space with the same level of digital sophistication as a 2008 church bake sale."
— Said with love. And a little trauma.One platform for emails. A different one for donations. A website that required a full IT degree to update — and the one person who had that degree was always stuck at their day job. A prayer time spreadsheet that somebody accidentally deleted on a Tuesday. You know the one.
The outdated website problem. Congregants showing up for events that were cancelled three weeks ago — because updating the website required a person who hasn't been available since Ramadan 2022.
The donation friction problem. A 6-step checkout process that made people give up and drop cash in the box instead — which is charming, but doesn't exactly help with financial planning.
The volunteer burnout problem. Dedicated people spending more time copy-pasting between systems than actually serving their community. They signed up to do good. They ended up doing data entry.
The five-platform problem. Donations here. Announcements there. Events somewhere else. Memberships in a spreadsheet. Sponsorships in someone's email drafts. Nobody had the full picture. Nobody.
We sat across from each other one day, looked at the chaos, and said the most dangerous sentence in the history of entrepreneurship:
"There has to be a better way. How hard could it be?"
— Famous last words. (Spoiler: it was hard. We did it anyway.)We didn't just want to build software. We needed to be the kind of people who actually understood the problem from the inside out.
AR has spent years building secure, scalable digital systems for the non-profit sector.
He's not a startup guy who read an article about mosques. He's someone who has sat in
the same rooms, served on the same boards, and watched technology fail the same communities —
then actually had the skills to do something about it.
As Umity's CTO, he designed an architecture that is fast, secure, and — critically —
simple enough that a volunteer running an event at 7pm on a Wednesday can actually use it.
That last part is harder than it sounds.
As a Director of Operations across multiple non-profit organizations, Vazir has personally
managed the budgets, juggled the events, wrangled the volunteers, and sat in the board
meetings where someone says "we really need to modernize" and then nothing happens for
four years.
He didn't come to this problem with a business thesis. He came with a decade of lived
experience — and a very specific list of things that needed to stop being as painful
as they were. That list became Umity's product roadmap.
Everything we always wished existed — finally in one place.
Lightning-fast, frictionless giving — because every extra tap between intention and completion costs you real dollars. We eliminated the friction. Your community shows up; Umity handles the rest.
Change an event time once, and it syncs everywhere — instantly. No more five-tab, three-email, one-panicked-text process. Your team updates one thing. Your congregation sees it. Done.
Umity is a Progressive Web App — which means your congregation doesn't need to find it, download it, or update it. They open a link. It works. That's it. Exactly as simple as it should be.
Live prayer times. Event listings with calendar view. Instant announcements — pushed directly to your community the moment something changes. Your masjid, always current, always connected.
We integrated local business sponsorships directly into the platform — giving your mosque a real, recurring revenue stream that doesn't depend on the next big fundraiser. Community supporting community.
Ten admin modules — memberships, donations, events, notifications, kiosk settings, marketing TV, and more — all in a single dashboard. One login. Full control. No IT degree required.
We built this because we love these spaces. Because we've watched brilliant, dedicated
people burn out over avoidable admin work. Because the community deserves better tools —
and we happened to be the people who could build them.
This isn't a VC-funded startup that discovered "the Muslim market" in a quarterly report.
It's two guys who grew up in these communities, served in them for years, and decided to stop
complaining and start building.
Today, Umity lives on every phone in your congregation's pocket. Soon, it'll live on the walls of your facility too. We're developing plug-and-play Umity Hardware — in-person kiosks for seamless giving, digital display boards for real-time announcements, and check-in systems that make your events actually manageable.
The vision was never just an app. It was an operating system for your entire community — digital and physical, online and on the ground.
Umity Hardware: Coming Soon In-person kiosks, digital displays & integrated giving — inside your facility
Every mosque administrator who reaches out to us gets the same thing we wanted when we were in their shoes: someone who actually gets it. Not a sales rep reading off a features sheet. Not a support ticket that takes three business days. Real people who have lived the problem and built the solution.
Umity is sustainable because the people behind it are obsessed with the mission — not the exit. We're not here to flip this in two years. We're here because this community is our community, and we intend to take care of it for a very long time.
That's the story. That's why this is real. And that's why it's going to work.