(Bloomberg) — Pakistan’s NayaPay Pvt. has raised $13 million in early stage funding as it seeks to capture millions of users in one of the world’s largest under banked nations.
The Karachi-based startup’s seed round was led by Zayn Capital, MSA Novo and Silicon Valley early-stage investor Graph Ventures, Chief Executive Officer Danish Lakhani said in an interview.
NayaPay became the first startup to offer financial services after receiving a license from the State Bank of Pakistan in August. The fintech’s chat-led payments app started by targeting students and freelancers.
Fintech startups in developing nations are drawing increasing investor interest as more people embraced the convenience of digital payments during the pandemic.
In Pakistan, only 1% of almost $4 trillion of payments are made digitally. The country has the third-largest population globally of people without access to banking services, according to the World Bank.
“Fintech is a tremendous opportunity in Pakistan,” said Lakhani, who previously led the country’s largest fiber-broadband service, StormFiber.
NayaPay is now building a payment platform for small and medium enterprises similar to Square, WeChat Pay and Venmo.
The company is targeting five million customers and 300,000 merchants in five years, said Lakhani.
Saison Capital, Lakson Group, Waleed Saigol’s Maple Leaf Capital and Warren Hogarth of Empower Finance also participated in the round.
“While just beginning to emerge, Pakistani fintechs have the advantage of learning from peers and making better-informed strategic bets,” said Faisal Aftab, co-founder at Zayn Capital.
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