In most of the world, the story of a small online sale starts the same way: someone types a web address, waits for a page to load, hunts for a product, and fills out a form. In Southeast Asia, it often starts differently. It starts with a message. A customer sends "still available?" to a shop, the shop replies, and the deal happens inside the same chat thread they use to talk to their family. Yezza built a company on that small, stubborn difference.
Yezza is a Malaysian software company, part of Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch, headquartered in Putrajaya. Its core idea is plain enough to fit on a sticky note: help small businesses sell through WhatsApp, the app they already open a hundred times a day. Instead of asking a fashion seller or a home baker to learn a new platform, Yezza slots into the one they never close.
01 / The ProblemOrder chaos in the inbox
Anyone who has run a small shop over chat knows the mess. Orders arrive as half-sentences between memes. Payment screenshots pile up. A customer asks whether the blue one is in stock while three others ask the same thing on different threads. Addresses get lost. At the end of the day, the "accounting" is a scroll back through conversations. It works until it doesn't - usually right when the business starts to grow.
Yezza's first job was to bring order to that. A merchant builds a simple store or sales page, shares the link in a chat, and the customer's order comes back as a structured record instead of a loose message. The company's WhatsApp Forms turn a conversation into a clean order with a product, a quantity, an address, and a payment status attached. The chat stays; the chaos leaves.
02 / The CustomerWho actually uses Yezza
The people on the other side of Yezza are not enterprises with procurement teams. They are micro and small merchants: fashion resellers, home restaurants, spas, salons, barbershops, veterinary clinics, even donation drives. More recently, service businesses with real back-office needs - clinics and dental practices - have become a focus. These are owners who count success in orders shipped, not dashboards viewed.
That customer shapes everything. The pricing is small and honest: a base plan around twelve dollars a month plus a few cents per order, or regional tiers priced in ringgit for individual tools. New features ship on a roughly two-week cadence. Support is meant to be fast, because a shop owner losing orders cannot wait a week for a ticket.
03 / The FounderA pivot, not a fresh start
Yezza's CEO, Ammar Roslizar, did not arrive as a first-timer. Before Yezza he helped build a travel business to roughly $12M in revenue - the kind of number that suggests he understood how ordinary businesses actually make money before software entered the picture. When travel collapsed, the question was not "what's the next hot idea" but "where are small businesses selling now." The answer was chat. Yezza was the pivot. His co-founder, Wan Aizuddin, leads the technical side.
04 / The ProductsFrom storefront to operating system
Yezza started narrow and expanded. What began as a way to sell on WhatsApp is now marketed as an operating system for a business. The through-line is that a merchant should be able to pick the pieces they need and ignore the rest.
The clinic and dental push is the most telling move. It signals that Yezza is willing to go deep on a vertical - appointments, billing, inventory, patient database - rather than stay a thin layer on top of chat. That is how a horizontal storefront tool quietly becomes the software a whole business runs on.
There is a discipline in how the pieces fit together. A shop owner does not buy "a platform"; they buy a store link, then a way to get paid, then a reason to message old customers. Each tool earns the next. By the time a merchant is running their books through Yezza Books and merging duplicate customer records, switching away means unwinding the whole business, not canceling one subscription. That stickiness was not bolted on later. It is the shape of the product.
The company also supports the unglamorous work that keeps merchants from leaving: data migration for large record sets, integrations with major courier services, and social pixel tracking for the sellers who advertise. None of it makes a flashy launch video. All of it is the reason a busy owner stays.
05 / The BusinessSelling to people who pay
There is one detail on Yezza's Y Combinator profile that stands out more than the GMV: profitable. For an early-stage company that raised a modest seed round - about $125K to $130K around 2022 - profitability is a different kind of signal than a big valuation. It means the software is worth paying for to the very people who are hardest to sell to: small merchants watching every ringgit.
The model is straightforward SaaS with usage on top. Subscriptions provide a floor; per-order fees mean Yezza grows when its merchants grow. It is not a model that produces overnight hypergrowth. It is one that survives. And in a market where funding for Southeast Asian startups runs hot and cold, surviving on customer revenue rather than the next round is its own kind of moat.
It also changes what the company optimizes for. When a per-order fee is part of the revenue, Yezza has a direct reason to make each merchant's checkout smoother, their broadcast more effective, their courier handoff cleaner. The incentive points the same direction as the customer's. That alignment is easy to write into a pitch deck and hard to actually build; a usage-based model forces it.
06 / The CompetitionNot the Shopify lane
It is tempting to file Yezza under "Shopify for WhatsApp," but that undersells the difference. Shopify and WooCommerce assume a website is the destination. Marketplaces like Shopee and Lazada assume a customer is browsing a catalog. Yezza assumes the customer is already in a conversation and never wanted to leave it. Its nearer rivals are chat-commerce tools - Take App, Wati, Interakt, Sleekflow - and regional storefront and POS players.
The moat is not clever code. It is local knowledge: how a spa in Selangor takes bookings, which e-wallets a Johor customer trusts, why a merchant would rather stay in WhatsApp than send someone to a checkout page. That understanding is expensive for a global giant to earn and cheap for a Putrajaya team that lives it.
07 / The MarketA chat-commerce bet
Yezza has framed its opportunity around a big, blunt number: roughly 50 million WhatsApp Business downloads across Southeast Asia, and a market it sized at about $7.2 billion. It also notes that similar buying behavior shows up in Latin America and Africa - places where the phone, and the chat app on it, is the primary computer. Whether or not the exact figures hold, the underlying observation is hard to argue with: a lot of commerce in these regions happens in conversation.
To make the physical side work, Yezza integrated Delyva's delivery booking platform, so a merchant can arrange a courier without leaving the flow. Selling in chat is only half the job; getting the parcel out the door is the other half.
08 / Why It MattersThe quiet kind of company
Yezza is not the loudest startup in its batch, and it is not trying to be. It is one of the few YC companies run from Putrajaya, serving a customer base that most Silicon Valley software will never bother to understand. Its bet - that the storefront can be a conversation - looks obvious in the markets it serves and strange everywhere else. That gap is the opportunity.
The question worth watching is whether "an operating system for your business" holds together as Yezza adds verticals, or whether focus wins. For now, the company has done the hard part twice: it found a real problem, and it got people to pay to solve it.