Pakistan-based fintech platform NayaPay has raised $13 million in a seed round to roll out its multi-service messaging and payment app, and to build payment acceptance and financial management tools for businesses in the South Asian country. The super-app allows people residing in Pakistan to send and receive money, split bills and make payments conveniently from smartphones. They have also issued virtual and physical Visa cards linked to the NayaPay wallet, further allowing its users to make POS payments and businesses to accept payments. NayaPay is leading a digital payment revolution in Pakistan, a cash-heavy economy, where only 1% of $4 trillion payments are done electronically. This is in a country of 220 million people. But NayaPay’s goal is even bigger: to bank millions of adults that remain unbanked, with women affected the most — only one in three women holds a bank account.
The round was led by Zayn Capital; London-based investment firm MSA Novo; global fund manager Graph Ventures; and an early-stage VC from Silicon Valley. It had the participation of Singapore-based Saison Capital, Waleed Saigol’s Maple Leaf Capital and Warren Hogarth, CEO Empower Finance and sponsors of the Lakson Group (a Pakistani conglomerate). The seed round is the largest seed financing round in the South Asian market, leapfrogging Tag, a banking and financial services platform that raised $12 million last year. It targets to have 5 million users over the next five years and grow the number of digital payments, which he says will impact other sectors like e-commerce as more people use the NayaPay wallet to make online transactions.