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Karachi-based Safepay has become the first fintech company from Pakistan to have graduated from Y Combinator.
Founded in 2019 by Ziyad Parekh and Raza Naqvi, Safepay is a payment gateway for online businesses, enabling them to receive (card) payments from their customers. It has built easy-to-use developer-friendly solutions that allow online businesses to set up payment integrations with their website or mobile app in minutes. Safepay also offers plugins to make integration even easier for platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, Opencart, and WordPress.
The startup was a part of YC’s S20 batch and graduated by participating in the demo day on Tuesday, It has raised the standard $150,000 investment as part of the program. Byte, a dark-kitchen-powered food delivery startup from Pakistan was also part of Y Combinator S20.
“We’ve build an elegant, composable solution that’s focused on developers and delivers a robust, scalable and flexible payments integration,” notes Safepay’s website, adding that the online businesses using them can leave the nuances and security around payments to them, “We eliminate needless complexity and extraneous details, you can get up and running with Safepay in just a couple of minutes.”
Ziyad Parekh, the co-founder of Safepay, said that with over 270 merchants using their solutions right now including brands like Ego and Kitchen Cuisine, that they’ve been growing 40 percent month over month and process total payments of $200,000 in July.
Presenting Safepay as the Stripe for Pakistan at YC’s demo day on Tuesday, Ziyad explained Safepay, “We’re growing considerably quickly each month processing over 5000 transactions in July alone. We’re extremely humbled by the demand for our services and are now focusing on growing the team to reach more merchants and help them receive digital payments.”
According to its website, Safepay charges the businesses using its service 3.3 percent and PKR 30 on every transaction they process. The website also breaks down the pricing and explains all the details. The startup doesn’t charge a setup fee.
Speaking about their experience of working with Y Combinator, Ziyad said, “It was fantastic. This was YC’s first completely remote batch (due to Covid-19) but it worked out especially well for us since Raza, my co-founder, was in Karachi and was able to progress the business from there while I was in SF handling the engineering and YC commitments. They really do an amazing job with founders and provide the exact guidance you need to kickstart your business.”
“Our fellow batch mates provided us with insights into their own unique businesses and the connections that we formed will prove to be invaluable in the future,” he added.
The digital payments space in Pakistan is dominated by mobile wallets and banks but all of them are known to offer a poor experience to both businesses working with them and the customers of these businesses due to different types of inefficiencies and that is apparently what Safepay is trying to fix with their offering.
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