digital-payments
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BukuWarung Put a Back Office in Indonesia's Pocket
A free ledger was the opening move. BukuWarung's larger bet is that the neighborhood shop can become a bank branch, bill-pay counter and data-rich business without losing the habits that made it work.
The VC Betting Pakistan's Cash Economy Will Become Software
Zayn VC looks sector-agnostic until you follow the money. Across wallets, freight, fashion and student loans, its portfolio makes one recurring wager: digitize the transaction first, then build finance on top of it.
How Razorpay Turned the 'Payment Failed' Screen Into a $7.5 Billion Business
It began because two engineers couldn't collect money online for a side project. A decade later Razorpay moves an estimated $180 billion a year for millions of Indian businesses - and is walking toward the public markets.
The Company That Taught Nigeria to Buy Online
Jumia built warehouses, a payment wallet and a fleet of delivery riders to sell phones and rice to a continent the big retailers skipped. Fourteen years in, Nigeria is the market deciding whether the bet finally pays off.
PayPal Wants to Be the Internet's Cash Register Again
The blue button helped teach the web to pay. Now PayPal is stitching checkout, Venmo, Braintree, credit, ads and AI agents into a new wager on how money will move.
The checkout has 1,000 doors. Zota wants one key.
Cards are only one dialect in global commerce. Zota built a payment gateway for the hundreds of local wallets, bank transfers, QR systems and currencies that decide whether an international checkout succeeds.
Jumia Uganda Is Building the Shop That Goes Where Shops Don’t
The orange marketplace sells everything from kettles to phones. Its more consequential product is the route between a seller, a pickup station and a customer far beyond Kampala.
EVO Built Ukraine’s Online Mall - Then Became the Plumbing
The company that helped Ukrainian merchants get online now runs marketplaces, payment rails and service platforms used across everyday commerce. Its advantage is not one storefront, but the connective tissue between sellers, shoppers and the transaction itself.
The Checkout Counter Where Crypto Becomes Ordinary Money
BitPay spent 15 years making one volatile idea feel routine: a customer pays from a crypto wallet, while the merchant can wake up to ordinary money in the bank.
Jumia's Real Product Is the Road Between a Click and a Front Door
The pan-African marketplace is learning that the hard part of online shopping is not the screen. It is everything that must happen after a customer taps buy.
Tata Built an App for Everything. Now It Has to Make Everything Feel Like One Thing
Tata Digital put groceries, medicine, electronics, travel, payments and rewards behind one blue icon. The next act is less about adding doors - and more about giving 140 million NeuPass members a reason to keep walking through them.
Nuvemshop Is Building the Operating System Behind Latin America’s Online Stores
The São Paulo-based commerce company is betting that Latin America’s merchants need more than a website. They need payments, parcels, marketing and WhatsApp sales to behave like one system.
One Fare at a Time, Snapp! Built Iran’s Everyday Operating System
Snapp! started by putting a price on a Tehran taxi ride before the passenger got in. A decade later, that small piece of certainty anchors a 20-service super app built for the peculiar scale, sanctions and street logic of Iran.
Sabre Wants to Turn Travel's Oldest Plumbing Into an AI Checkout
Born from a chance conversation between two airplane seatmates, Sabre made reservations instant. Six decades later, it is trying to make the travel industry's fragmented checkout work like one intelligent transaction.
Visa
Visa is less a card company than a piece of global choreography - a network that turns a tap in a shop into a trusted conversation among banks, merchants and billions of credentials. Now it is extending that choreography to instant payouts, stablecoins and shopping agents.
SoftBank Group Corp.
SoftBank began as a software wholesaler and became a telecom operator, a startup financier and now an aspiring owner of the AI stack. Its latest wager ties models, chips, data centers and robots into one capital-intensive system.
Mastercard
The famous circles sit on billions of cards, but Mastercard's real product is the invisible choreography behind a payment - a global network now learning to serve bank accounts, virtual cards, stablecoins and shopping agents without losing the trust that made the plastic useful.
Bikry App (Bizrise Technologies YC W20)
Bikry, built by Bizrise Technologies (Y Combinator W20), is a no-code direct-to-consumer platform that lets Indian retailers and small business owners launch an online store in minutes at 0% commission. It bundles a shareable catalog, 40+ digital payment options, and 35+ pan-India delivery partners so shop owners can sell through WhatsApp and social media without building a website or paying marketplace fees.
Chari
Chari is a Moroccan B2B e-commerce and fintech company that turned the country's corner grocery stores into digital customers. Through one app, the traditional shopkeepers who form the backbone of North African retail can order fast-moving consumer goods and get them delivered in under 24 hours, keep their customer credit ledgers, accept card payments, pay bills, and tap embedded financial services. Founded in 2020 by Ismael Belkhayat and Sophia Alj, Chari was the first Moroccan startup admitted to Y Combinator (S21). In October 2025 it raised a $12M Series A - the largest in Morocco's history - and became the first VC-backed Moroccan company to win a payment institution license from the central bank, the foundation for its Banking-as-a-Service platform.
Schoolable
Schoolable is a Lagos-based fintech (Y Combinator W'19) building financial infrastructure for African education. Through a web platform for schools and a mobile app for parents, it helps private K-12 schools collect fees on time, reconcile payments, run payroll and manage expenses, while letting families plan, save, borrow and pay school fees in installments. Founded by Henry Chibuzo and Angela Essien, it operates on the premise that access to affordable finance is the biggest barrier to quality education in Africa.
Fluid
Fluid is a Singapore-based B2B payments platform that lets suppliers and marketplaces offer their business buyers flexible credit terms and installments at the point of purchase. Its AI underwriting engine approves buyers in seconds, pays suppliers on day one, and automates reconciliation - bringing consumer-grade buy-now-pay-later mechanics to business commerce across Southeast Asia. Founded in early 2023 by former Atome and Uber operators, Fluid has raised US$7M and serves 3,000+ businesses across Singapore and Malaysia.
HALA
HALA is a Riyadh-based fintech building the 'bank of the future' for small and medium enterprises across Saudi Arabia and the wider MENA region. Founded in 2018 by Esam AlNahdi and Maher Loubieh, it combines business IBAN accounts, card issuance, POS and soft-POS payment acceptance, expense management and SME financing into a single platform regulated by the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA). HALA serves more than 140,000 businesses, processes over $8 billion in annual transactions, and in September 2025 raised a $157 million Series B - one of the largest fintech Series B rounds in the Middle East - at a reported valuation near $900 million.
ipaymy
ipaymy is a Singapore-based fintech that lets businesses and individuals use their existing credit cards to pay expenses that normally do not accept cards - rent, salaries, supplier invoices and taxes. By routing these payments through its platform, ipaymy helps users free up working capital with up to 55 days of interest-free credit, earn card rewards on everyday expenses, and get paid faster through its Fetch invoicing tool. Licensed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore as a Major Payment Institution, it operates across Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Australia.
MNT-Halan
MNT-Halan is an Egyptian fintech that digitally banks the unbanked and underbanked across emerging markets. Founded by Mounir Nakhla, it combines microfinance, consumer and business lending, buy-now-pay-later, mobile wallets, payments and an FMCG/appliance e-commerce marketplace into a single app, all powered by its proprietary Neuron core-banking technology. It became Egypt's first fintech unicorn in 2023 and now operates across Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan and the UAE, having disbursed billions of dollars in loans to millions of customers.
Nearpay
Nearpay is a Riyadh-based fintech that turns any NFC-equipped smartphone into a payment terminal. Its payment-infrastructure-as-a-service platform gives banks, payment providers and developers a certified SoftPOS (tap-to-phone) SDK plus the full stack behind it - acceptance, compliance, certification, reconciliation and merchant dashboards - so businesses can accept in-person card payments in about 30 minutes without dedicated hardware. Founded in 2020, Nearpay was one of the first companies certified under Visa's tap-to-phone program, processed more than 40 million transactions in 2024, and in 2025 became the first Saudi payments fintech to expand into the United States.
Taptap Send
Taptap Send is a mobile-first remittance app that lets migrants and diaspora communities send money home to Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean quickly and at low cost. Founded in 2018 by Michael Faye and Paul Niehaus - the team behind GiveDirectly and Segovia - the app charges no explicit transfer fee on most corridors, earning instead through a transparent exchange-rate margin, and delivers roughly 95% of payments within three minutes to bank accounts, mobile-money wallets and cash-pickup points across 70+ destination countries.
Closinglock
Closinglock is an Austin-based fintech that helps title companies, real estate attorneys, and agents prevent wire fraud and modernize the closing process. Its platform moves wire instructions, payments, identity verification, document signing, and payoff retrieval out of insecure email and into a single secure portal. Founded in 2017 after a co-founder watched a client nearly lose their life savings to a phishing scam, Closinglock says it has protected more than 1 million home sales worth over $500 billion and raised $34M in Series B funding in January 2025.
應援科技 OenTech
應援科技 OenTech is a Taipei-based fintech that runs a one-stop integrated payment cloud platform combining third-party payment processing with a CRM-style supporter management system. Tailored for nonprofits, creators, political campaigns, temples and merchants, it lets organizations accept donations, sell tickets and merchandise, manage memberships and issue receipts on a single, security-certified stack. Certified to PCI-DSS Level 1, ISO 27001 and ISO 27701, Oen positions itself as one of Taiwan's most secure payment platforms and now serves more than 1,000 organizations.
Fiserv
Fiserv is a Milwaukee-based financial technology company that provides payment processing, core banking software, and merchant services to banks, credit unions, businesses, and consumers around the world. Formed in 1984 and transformed by its 2019 acquisition of First Data, it runs the Clover point-of-sale platform, the Carat enterprise commerce operating system, and account-processing systems that power a large share of everyday transactions - from a corner cafe swiping a card to a regional bank settling deposits overnight.
Kickfin
Kickfin is an Austin-based fintech that automates how restaurants and hospitality businesses calculate and pay out tips. Instead of managers counting cash and stuffing envelopes at the end of each shift, Kickfin pushes gratuities in real time straight to employees' existing bank accounts - no cash, no cards, no waiting. Founded in 2017, the company was the first end-to-end digital tip management platform and has since paid out more than $2 billion to over 250,000 restaurant workers, integrating with major POS and payroll systems to eliminate manual uploads and reduce tip errors.