Can a Northern Virginia tech incubator beat ISIS with startups?

That promise of power, independence, renown and financial gain that ISIS uses to attract disaffected Muslim youth? Startups can provide all that too.
That’s the essential theory held by Affinis Labs and its cofounder Shahed Amanullah.
Amanullah, a former White House advisor and serial entrepreneur, founded Falls Church, Va.-based Affinis in February 2015 in order to provide an opportunity for young Muslim Americans to build businesses around the issues they care about.
Affinis does this by holding hackathons around the world, then incubating and helping to launch the high-potential ideas. Just as the incubator itself focuses on serving the Muslim community, the ideas incubated there also attend to the specific needs of young Muslims. Amanullah recently told Red Bull’s Amaphiko Magazine about a few of the ideas Affinis Labs is working with, and each tackles a fascinating, challenging issue.
Ideas currently being incubated range from an app for youth mentorship to a social media solution to combat Islamophobic harassment to a game that helps young Muslim men identify role models and so much more.
“We partner with Google and Facebook to bring entrepreneurship to communities that have been underserved,” Amanullah told Amaphiko. “We bring that underutilized talent to the table.”
And that underutilized talent is creating fascinating startups, all just a Metro ride away.
Read the Amaphiko piece here. Full disclosure: It was written by Tony Abraham, the lead reporter for Technical.ly sister site Generocity.org.