Dubai-based Zywa, a neobank for Gen Z, plans to gasoline its development within the United Arabs Emirates (UAE), and to kick-start its growth to Saudi Arabia and Egypt after elevating $3 million seed funding at over $30 million (110 million AED) valuation. The brand new funding follows the $1 million pre-seed backing it secured in February this yr.
Goodwater Capital, Dubai Future District Fund, Insurgent Fund, Trampoline Enterprise Companions, Zemu VC, numerous distinguished European household places of work and strategic angel traders participated within the newest spherical.
Zywa was based by Alok Kumar (CEO) and Nuha Hashem (CTO) in 2021, impressed by their lived experiences within the gulf area, the place they primarily used money or their dad and mom’ playing cards to make funds. They created Zywa as a social banking app and pay as you go card to make it doable for Gen Z (between the age of 11-25 years) to obtain cash, handle it and make funds.
The app brings comfort to folks too, because it permits them to ship cash to their kids, and to observe their spending and saving habits.
“Gen Zs within the UAE spend about AED 5B+ yearly, and nonetheless depend on money or their dad and mom’ playing cards regardless of having choices like supplementary playing cards issued by their dad and mom’ banks. Whereas these choices give entry to digital funds, they aren’t essentially designed for Gen Z, and that is the place we add worth,” Kumar, stated in an announcement.
“We’re Gen Z constructing for Gen Z, and we goal to develop our product as they develop, to be the one monetary companies platform they may ever want…The seed fund will assist us deal with product, development and strategic partnerships to speed up our efforts within the UAE and Egypt markets, whereas prepping us to launch in Saudi Arabia by early 2023,” stated Kumar.
Dad and mom use the app to ship cash to their kids, and to observe their spending and saving habits. Picture Credit: Zywa
The strategic partnerships Zywa is exploring embody working with colleges to host workshops and hackathons to additional expose it to its goal clientele. It additionally plans on partnering with teen-led companies to allow them to promote on the app, along with low cost partnerships with manufacturers which are standard with Gen Z.
Zywa additionally plans to introduce a social aspect to its app by enabling its customers to share pictures or movies of their purchases, and to react to their mates’ purchases on completely different feeds.
The fintech can be including community-based value-add companies like a platform it’s constructing inside the app to allow customers to use for internships at Zywa and companion startups, as a technique for encouraging customers to start out incomes early. That is along with gamifying finance by rewarding those who save, finances and make investments their cash.
“Our reward system “Zems (Zywa gems) and Zyons (Zywa cash)” rewards customers for wholesome monetary habits and are presently used as a loyalty mechanism. As soon as we attain a set quantity of customers (100,000+ customers), we’ll tokenize the “Zems and Zyons”, which can be utilized for peer-to-peer transfers, to buy objects at their favourite shops and settle with retailers immediately by means of the tokens, eliminating scheme involvement by means of a closed-loop system, thus including extra income streams for us,” Hashem informed TechCrunch.
Zywa earns from card interchange income, and thru service provider or model partnerships.
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