A photocopied credit card is an odd thing to build a company around. It suggests a business with enough money to spend, enough people to spend it, and no satisfactory arrangement between the two. Daniel Kniaz and his co-founder, Russell Martin, encountered precisely that sort of improvisation: company card details shared around an office, sometimes sitting on a shared drive. Somebody had found a way to get the purchase made. The questions about who had spent what could wait.
For Kniaz, that gap became a market. But he arrived at it by a roundabout route. Before Weel, the Sydney spend management company he leads, there was a consumer payment product called DiviPay. Before that, there was bank innovation work. And before financial technology had taken over the wardrobe, there were socks.
The sequence makes his career more interesting than a straight ascent through funding announcements. Kniaz did not begin with a grand plan for the finance department. He kept testing where a product could be useful, and changed direction when the answer changed. The company now serves finance teams across Australia and New Zealand. Its origins involve considerably smaller groups of people trying to settle up.
An education below the ankle
Kniaz’s early sock venture had a modest purpose: learn to sell and build a brand. T-shirts already attracted plenty of aspiring entrepreneurs. Socks offered a narrower opening. The choice had a pleasing lack of ceremony. A young person could start learning commerce with an item that most customers would immediately conceal under their trousers.
His university studies combined business and psychology at Macquarie. He attended from 2010 to 2014 and received academic recognition in negotiation and accounting information for decision making. Those subjects sit comfortably beside his later work: a payment product has to make sense in the accounts and in the mind of the person expected to use it.
His early career included consulting at Deloitte and time in California. He described being influenced there by young people building their own projects. Back in Australia, he took a job at Westpac to build savings before committing to his own venture. Entrepreneurship, in this telling, had a household budget attached.
At Westpac, he found the partnership that would last. Kniaz brought the nontechnical side; Martin brought technical expertise. Their innovation work involved investigating problems, talking to customers and testing prototypes. A bank supplied a place to learn those habits. It also supplied a reason to leave: the frustration of building things that did not reach the market.
The trip, the spreadsheet, the wrong customer
The first consumer problem was easy to recognise. A group trip left Kniaz and friends with shared costs, complicated spreadsheets and people waiting weeks to recover their money. The holiday had ended; its accounts were still enjoying an extended stay.
In 2017, DiviPay offered a way for a group to contribute to a virtual card and pay a merchant together. It addressed the awkward interval in which one friend becomes everybody else’s temporary banker. The name described the job: divide the payment.
The founders had initially explored an invisible payment experience, then followed feedback toward group spending. Their early split-payment product attracted more than 1,000 pre-launch registrations in two weeks. That sounds encouraging, and it was. But interest in a convenient way to spend money does not automatically mean an interest in paying for the convenience.
DiviPay also tried a single-use virtual card aimed at protecting consumers’ details online. The payment technology offered possibilities. Finding a commercial home for it took more work. Consumer financial services carried a difficult expectation: the useful part should arrive free.
Businesses supplied a different answer. Customers could see how the same technology might work in their companies. The founders had to decide whether to keep serving consumers or commit to this new demand. Kniaz’s later account places the early idea in Martin’s apartment, a familiar setting for a startup. The less decorative detail is the willingness to let that apartment’s original plan be revised.
- 01Split the billConsumer group payments
- 02Protect the purchaseSingle-use virtual cards
- 03Manage the spendBusiness cards & expenses
A photocopied card is a business plan
The business opportunity was grounded in workarounds. Small organisations could struggle to obtain enough corporate cards for their teams. A growing company might have cash available but still fail to fit a bank’s card requirements. The alternative could be one director’s card passed around, or employees paying first and requesting reimbursement later.
The shared card made attribution difficult. The reimbursement route transferred the waiting to the employee. Both got a purchase through the checkout. Neither made the surrounding administration particularly agreeable. DiviPay’s business product could issue individual virtual cards with spending controls and connect the resulting transactions to accounting software.
That gave Kniaz a more specific customer and a more specific job to do. Finance teams wanted control, employees needed a usable payment method, and the books needed a record. Requests for subscriptions, bill payments and other expense functions followed. A card became an entry into the wider machinery of a business.
His approach to customer feedback was similarly practical. He described asking users how they would feel if DiviPay disappeared, then examining what committed users valued and what would make less committed users care more. The exercise forced a distinction between a pleasant feature and a product somebody relied on.
“Go deep and don’t get distracted by the shiny new thing.”
Daniel Kniaz, 2019
That advice has some bite coming from a founder whose own product had changed shape. A useful pivot and an attractive distraction can look remarkably similar from the outside. In DiviPay’s case, customer demand provided the argument for the change. The technology was being redirected toward an identifiable problem, with businesses willing to use it in their daily work.
Money arrives; the name catches up
By September 2019, DiviPay had raised A$2.3 million in a round led by ANZi, ANZ’s venture arm. Seed Space Ventures and former Pepper Money chief Patrick Tuttle also participated. The platform had a couple of hundred customers, ranging from small construction businesses to technology companies. Canva was among them.
In December 2021 came an A$20 million round, with backers including Global Founders Capital and Rapyd Ventures. The announced plans covered product development, international expansion and growing a team of 20. DiviPay reported more than 1,000 customers and growth exceeding 300 percent over the preceding year. These were the figures of that moment, before the company acquired its current name.
Funding round led by ANZi
Capital for the next expansion
By September 2022, the name DiviPay had become a souvenir of an earlier customer. Kniaz announced Weel as a brand with room for a broader spend management product. The change followed the business rather than anticipating it. A company built to divide a shared bill was now helping organisations manage many kinds of spending.
Kniaz described the underlying idea as collective accountability: people could have their own cards and budgets within rules set by finance. There is a small but meaningful difference in the experience. A borrowed director’s card leaves responsibility vague. An individual card with a defined budget gives a purchase an owner.
The card travels further
In March 2024, Kniaz announced a partnership with Nium and the introduction of Visa Business Debit cards. The stated customer problems were international acceptance, foreign exchange costs and visibility over payments. His audience had expanded from people dividing a trip’s expenses to businesses whose employees might be spending abroad.
The partnership also illustrates how his company works within the payments ecosystem. A founder can build the spending experience around existing financial infrastructure. For Weel, Nium and Visa helped support the next stage of that experience. The card remained a way into the transaction; the company’s own software organised the business process around it.
In June 2025, Weel announced an upgraded accounts payable automation suite. The product direction was moving further into invoices, approvals and payment workflows. Kniaz’s role had become broader than making a virtual card available. He was pursuing the administrative work attached to the movement of money, wherever that work appeared.
The ambition after the receipt
In August 2026, Kniaz set out Weel’s next chapter under the phrase Every Expense Complete. His argument was that finance software still left people carrying too much repetitive work. He arranged the finance function as a hierarchy: administration at the base, reporting and connection in the middle, strategic work above. Getting to the upper levels depended on finishing the lower ones.
His proposed next phase includes software that completes expense tasks, times invoice payments, books travel within policy and negotiates with suppliers. These are ambitions he laid out for the future. Their breadth makes the choice of a starting point matter: finish a transaction properly, then extend that approach to more kinds of spending.
His argument: the work at the base has to be completed before the team can move upward.
Weel currently reports more than 4,000 finance teams, 60,000 cardholders and over A$1 billion in annual managed spend. Those are company-reported measures of the platform’s scale. They also give the latest ambition a substantial testing ground: many people, many purchases, many opportunities for an expense to remain unfinished.
Kniaz’s recurring subject is the work that a payment leaves behind. Friends had spreadsheets. Employees had reimbursement claims. Finance teams have receipts, approvals and reconciliations. The setting changes, but there is usually somebody waiting for the loose ends to be tied.
The socks belong in this story because they show where the learning began. A customer has a need; a seller tests a response. Weel adds software, payment networks and a much larger organisation to that exchange. Kniaz’s career has depended on recognising when the response needs changing. His next test is whether a finance team can make a purchase and find that more of the work is already finished.