Walid Mah'd spent his early career reading payments reports at Mastercard. Then he went backpacking, couldn't buy noodles, and started Moreta to let travelers pay Asia's local QR networks with the phone already in their hand.
The counter is small. A pot of broth, a stack of bowls, a hand-lettered menu, and taped to the register, a black-and-white square. The locals in line pull out their phones, point them at the square, and walk off with lunch. Walid Mah'd stood there with a wallet full of cards from the world's biggest payment network and no way to buy a bowl of noodles.
He had spent years on the inside of that network. At Mastercard Advisors he was a card and fintech payments consultant, the kind of role where you learn exactly how money moves across borders, which rails carry it, and where the fees pile up. He knew the diagrams. What the diagrams never told him was how it felt to be a traveler standing at a food stall in Southeast Asia, watching a system he understood on paper refuse to work in practice.
That gap - between knowing a problem and feeling one - is where Moreta started.
Across much of Asia, the checkout has already moved on. QR-code digital wallets have become the default way to pay, at restaurants, market stalls, taxis, and corner shops. For residents it is effortless. For a visitor arriving from a card-first country, it is a closed door. Merchants may not take foreign cards. Cash means airport exchange rates and ATM fees. So travelers juggle currencies and payment methods and quietly pay a tax for being from somewhere else.
Moreta's answer is almost boring in its simplicity: scan the QR code that is already there. A traveler verifies their identity, links a bank account, and pays local merchants by scanning the same code a resident would. Underneath that single tap sits everything hard - identity checks, bank connections, currency conversion, fraud monitoring - all of it hidden so the person at the counter just pays and moves on.
The framing matters. Most of fintech has spent years trying to make Western cards work in more places. Moreta runs the other direction. Instead of pushing a new card into a QR world, it meets travelers where the QR code already won.
To understand why Moreta exists, it helps to see how far two payment cultures have drifted apart. In card-centric markets, the muscle memory is the tap - a physical card or a phone held to a terminal. Across much of Asia, the muscle memory is the scan - a camera pointed at a printed square. Neither side built its checkout to welcome the other.
Directional illustration of the tap-vs-scan split, not a measured survey.
A traveler crossing that line does not get a warning. They get a declined card and an awkward pause. Moreta's whole reason for being is to erase that pause - to let a card-market visitor drop into a scan-market checkout and pay as if they belonged there.
Moreta is a two-person story before it is a company. Walid built it with Sam Yu, his co-founder and chief technology officer, and the two have been friends since high school. Between them they have traveled to more than forty countries, which is less a fun fact than a research method. Every trip was a chance to feel the same friction from a new angle.
Their backgrounds slot together neatly. Walid brings the payments fluency - the Mastercard Advisors years, an HBA from Ivey Business School, and a traveler's map that runs through Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Sam brings the building - a computer science degree from the University of Waterloo, product work used by tens of millions of people, and stints at Apple, Google, Meta, and Uber. One knows how money is supposed to move. The other knows how to make software that millions actually use.
There is a certain confidence in choosing the harder market. Moreta launched first across Southeast and East Asia - Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Cambodia, Laos, and Mongolia - not because it is the easy path, but because it is where the behavior already lives. QR wallets there are not a bet on the future; they are the present. The opportunity is not to change how a region pays. It is to let the rest of the world join in.
The company came together fast. Founded in 2024, Moreta joined Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch, raised a $130K seed, and shipped Moreta Pay to the App Store, all in the span of a single accelerator sprint. It is a small team - four people - working on a problem with a very large number attached to it: those 200 million annual arrivals and their $410 billion in everyday spending.
What makes the story land is not the size of the market but the size of the moment it grew from. A lot of fintech founders open with rails and infrastructure. Walid opens with a feeling - the specific, slightly embarrassing experience of standing at a counter, phone in hand, unable to pay for something everyone around you is buying without a thought. Start with the moment, the good products seem to say, and the infrastructure follows.
The near-term goal is unglamorous and clear: more merchants, more countries, more travelers who never think about the machinery at all. The longer arc is about who gets to participate. As regional wallets begin to link up for cross-border payments, the question is whether a visitor from a card-first country can plug into that network. Moreta wants to be the plug.
It is a mission that only really makes sense if you have felt it. Walid has - somewhere in Southeast Asia, at a stall with a taped-up QR code, holding a wallet that suddenly meant nothing. The consultant who once studied how money moves is now trying to move it for everyone else who lands somewhere new and just wants to pay for lunch.