UAE-based Qashio Launches with $2.5M Pre-SEED
UAE-headquartered FinTech, Qashio has entered the MENA market on a strong note raising $2.5M in its pre-seed funding to provide an enterprise-grade expense management platform enabling business owners and finance leaders full visibility and control of all expenses.
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UAE-based FinTech and expense management platform Qashio has successfully raised $2.5M in its latest funding round to launch in the MENA market. The Pre-SEED round was led by global VC firm, MSA Novo, and supported by Rally Cap Ventures, Palm Drive Capital, Plug and Play Ventures, as well as regional strategic angels, entrepreneurs, and family offices. Executives from Grubtech, Danske Bank, Two Sigma, Xiaomi, and top global fintech companies participated in the round as well.
Founded in 2021 by seasoned serial entrepreneurs Jonathan Lau and Armin Moradi, Qashio is a Fintech solution offering businesses a comprehensive enterprise expense management solution. Armin and Jonathan previously worked together while building Carriage, where they personally experienced the pain point of expense tracking and management. Their dashboard integrates real-time tracking for every business expense and allows enterprises and SMEs to make informed cash flow decisions.
As recorded in our State of Startup Funding- 2022 Emerging Venture Markets Free Report, available for download, FinTech was the industry of choice for the VC ecosystem across all Emerging Venture Markets. Recording a 550% YoY growth in VC funding over 2021, the FinTech sector observed sizable investments in alternative payment solutions like Tabby (UAE) and Paymob (EGY), Open and Digital Banking solutions like Tarabut Gateway (Bahrain) and JUMO (SA), as well as a plethora of market-focused offerings like peer-to-peer payment platforms and micro-crediting solutions. Diving deeper into the data provided in our newly released 2022 FinTech Venture Investment Report, the UAE remains a hub for FinTech in MENA; UAE-based FinTech startups raised almost 50% of all capital deployed in the sector across the region, where 1 out of every 3 FinTech deals in MENA was closed by a startup in the UAE. Remarkably, Qashio’s Pre-SEED round was north of the average FinTech Early-Stage deal in 2021 (Pre-Seed- Series A), $2.1M, which reflects great promise for the UAE-based FinTech.
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Qashio's virtual cards combined with its software allow businesses to manage their spending in a more automated and transparent way, saving hundreds of man-hours and reducing petty cash leakage in the process. Finance and HR departments benefit from better expense reporting, better visibility, control of cash flows, and an empowered workforce. “We are committed to having clear, easy, and fast onboarding processes for brands with no long-term commitments or heavy monthly service fees” stated Qashio CEO Armin Moradi.
The FinTech sector in the Middle East is growing rapidly with a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 30%. By 2023, it’s predicted that 800+ FinTech companies from sub-segments including payments, open banking, RegTech and compliance, smart lending, InsurTech, blockchain, and cybersecurity solutions for the financial industry (such as anti-money-laundering, anti-fraud, identity theft, identity management, and others) will raise over $2 billion in venture capital funding. The launch of Qashio is in line with UAE’s vision for the next 50 years to accelerate world-class digitization and adoption of ICT across aspects of the business. "Investing globally across b2b fintech platforms, we have monitored expense management players evolving across all major regions. Qashio is poised to be MENA's breakout winner due to its founding team's proven track record in building superior products and ability to execute in selling to enterprises. We are excited to partner with Qashio to impart best practices derived across other emerging tech markets." said Seamon Chan, Palm Drive Capital.
With Qashio, Business Owners, CFOs, HR Leaders, and finance teams can set spending limits on virtual & physical cards issued in seconds, limit and control spend categories and vendors. This eliminates the use of cash, avoids late expense claims, reduces the amount of work put into reimbursements, and ultimately replaces manual invoicing and vendor /supplier payment. Qashio has over 50+ customers, including Nana, Grubtech, Carasti & Swiss International Hotels. They have customers across UAE and KSA, and an expanding waitlist.
In launching its services across MENA, Qashio is not only solving for better accessibility and transparency over team spending but more importantly for optimizing spend streams through integrated Tech. The funding will be used to expand the operations team and customer support, evolve the current features and integrations with additional fintech partners and rewards programs. Jonathan Lau and Armin Moradi, co-founders of Qashio concluded, “Businesses in the MENA region have been operating with limited ability to issue cards and manage employee expenses. At Qashio, we are committed to helping companies move away from all those manual finance processes and get more visibility and control by providing a secure, safe solution that is ready for enterprise-grade deployment as well as SMEs.”
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