About the studio

Small studio, senior hands.

Novas is a design-led, AI-native studio, incorporated in the Maldives, with a team split between Malaysia and the Maldives. We stay deliberately small so every project gets senior hands. We build with AI in the loop so a small team moves like a much bigger one.
What we believe

The people deciding what to build should be the people building it.

Novas was founded in 2020. We wanted a studio where the people deciding what to build were the people building it — because we had watched enough strategy decks die on contact with implementation.
We work in small teams, embed closely with each client, and stay with the work into production and operation. We say no a lot — but when we say yes, we ship.
Origins

Why "Novas"?

A nova is a sudden, brilliant flare from an otherwise quiet star — a long buildup of pressure that becomes, in one moment, visible from across the sky. That's how the best product work feels to us. Months of quiet research, framing, prototyping, and discipline. Then a launch that looks, to everyone watching, like it happened overnight.
We picked the name to remind ourselves that the visible moment is the small part. The work is the long quiet before it.
Our ethos
AI can build fast.
It can't tell good from great.
How we think

Three rules we don't break.

01

Prototype over promise

Two weeks to something you can click.

02

Senior hands only

No handoffs to a junior team. The people you meet are the people who build.

03

Ship, then stay

We host and operate everything we build.

The crew

Who you’ll work with.

Mohamed Jailam Rafeeg

Mohamed Jailam Rafeeg

Managing Director
Maldives

Full-stack engineer first, title second. Works in Ruby on Rails and Laravel against PostgreSQL and MySQL, and spends most of his time on the stuff that actually breaks: AI document extraction, payment and reconciliation flows, multi-tenant platforms. Has shipped systems across hospitality, procurement, education finance, HR, travel, and logistics — different industries, same instinct for where the data quietly goes wrong.

Mufhim Anees Hussain

Mufhim Anees Hussain

Design & Systems Strategy
Malaysia

Designer first, systems thinker second. Ten years across HP, HPE, DXC, and Dell, up to Senior Principal Designer — in places where eight tools do one job and everyone's made peace with it. He doesn't. Results: $10M in projected savings, +7% conversion, 100% AA compliance, and teams that ship faster. Lately: evolving and teaching AI-native design practice and product models. Outside work: esports, watched with the focus most people save for a real job.

Rudzainy Rahman

Rudzainy “Tom” Rahman

Engineering & Interface Design
Malaysia

UI/UX designer and Ruby on Rails engineer — a combination that's rarer than it should be. Works in Rails and Bullet Train with a standards-first discipline: a locked component style enforced by the test suite, money handled in integer minor units instead of floating point, because rounding errors in a bank balance aren't a design flourish. Built the Bionix internal design system at DXC Technology before Novas.

Elma Adura

Elma Adura

Product Design & Brand Strategist
Malaysia

Designer by intention. Brand strategist by experience. Artist at heart. For 20+ years, she has moved between strategy and craft, pixels and possibilities, turning ideas into experiences people can see, understand, and remember. She works across product strategy, UX, interaction, visual design, and storytelling — moving comfortably between the big picture and the pixel that makes it work. At Dell, she led a team of nine designers across B2B and B2C experiences, turning complicated product journeys into clearer, more compelling experiences. For her, design isn’t just about what people see. It’s about what they understand, feel, and remember.

Awab

Awab

Engineering Intern
Malaysia

Builds the thing and then makes sure it stays up. Works across Rails, Next.js, and React Native, and owns parts like deploys and hosting. Still studying, and shipping work that people depend on.

FAQ

Questions? We're here.

01What does Novas actually do?+

Consulting, design, development, and hosting — as one team. You can hire a single practice, but most partners take the full stack: the plan you approve is the plan that ships.

02What does AI-native mean in practice?+

AI sits inside every workflow — research, prototyping, code review, QA. It's why a small team moves like a much bigger one. The decisions are still ours; AI just makes them faster to act on.

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