Dubai-based wealth fintech WiserGates is seeking to lower the barriers to private-equity-style ownership by combining fractional investment, blockchain technology and financial education.
For Muhammad Refayet Chowdhury and Md Nazibur Rahman, the idea behind WiserGates began with a simple observation: millions of salaried individuals may have money to invest, but rarely enough to access the productive assets that can generate meaningful long-term wealth.
Their answer is NANO Assets, a platform designed to pool what the founders describe as “nano capital” — small amounts of individual savings — into fractional ownership of profitable, cash-generating businesses.
WiserGates, headquartered at the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), has opened its pre-seed funding round at a US$30 million valuation, with anchor commitments from Tokyo-based NewVision Japan Co. Ltd. and London-based 1CS Holdings Limited.
For the founders, the valuation reflects an attempt to balance ambition with the realities of early-stage investing. Rather than adopting a conventional “burn and scale” approach, they say they used a discounted cash-flow model based on their focus on profitable growth and cash generation, followed by a startup-risk adjustment.
“We were not looking for just any money,” says Chowdhury, Co-founder and CEO. “We wanted strategic investors who bring guidance and judgment alongside capital.”
The model is informed by the founders’ own investment experience. Over five years, WiserGates has deployed more than US$2 million across more than 10 companies and asset classes, spanning sectors including trading, exports, technology, transport and commodities.
That experience also exposed the challenges of investing in small businesses. “Private equity is fundamentally about people,” says Rahman, Co-founder and COO. The founders found that financial discipline, accounting and transparency could be as important as the underlying business opportunity.
Those lessons have influenced NANO Assets’ approach to business selection. Initially, WiserGates is focusing on everyday businesses such as groceries, salons, gyms, restaurants and farming — sectors where demand can be relatively tangible and operations can be assessed.
The platform aims to use blockchain and smart contracts to divide ownership into smaller digital units, potentially allowing investors to participate with relatively modest amounts of capital.
Financial education is another pillar. NANO Assets plans to incorporate short “nano modules” covering subjects such as inflation and private equity, while entrepreneurs will be assessed through an “investability matrix” incorporating factors such as transparency, financial discipline and track record.
“People learn better by doing,” says Chowdhury. “The goal is not simply to create investors, but educated investors, because uneducated investors can weaken the entire market.”
Regulation remains central to the model. WiserGates says it is engaging with DIFC and the Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA) on the appropriate structure and licensing pathway as it develops its real-world asset tokenisation offering.
“We do not want to operate in a grey area,” says Rahman. “Our goal is to remain aligned with regulators and build access responsibly, with investor protection at the centre.”
Why UAE & Dubai?
The choice of Dubai as WiserGates’ launchpad is equally central to the founders’ strategy.
The company emerged from a journey that began in Bangladesh, but the founders say the UAE quickly stood out because of its approach to innovation, financial infrastructure and international business.
“What struck us immediately was how quickly the government moves and how open the ecosystem is to regulatory and financial innovation,” says Chowdhury.
The founders identify three particular reasons for establishing WiserGates in the UAE: the country’s focus on digital trust, regulatory frameworks that can support financial innovation, and its position as a destination for international capital.
For WiserGates, however, the ambition extends beyond creating another investment platform. “We realised that the most valuable thing we could build was not a product, but a system,” says Rahman. “NANO Assets is our first major attempt at building that system.”
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