Dubai-based Zywa, a neobank for Gen Z, plans to gas its progress within the United Arabs Emirates (U.A.E), and to kick-start its enlargement 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 12 months.
Goodwater Capital, Dubai Future District Fund, Insurgent Fund, Trampoline Enterprise Companions, Zemu VC, plenty of outstanding European household workplaces, and strategic angel buyers 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 the 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 allows them to ship cash to their kids, and to watch 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, mentioned in a press release.
“We’re Gen Z constructing for Gen Z, and we goal to develop our product as they develop, to be the one monetary providers platform they’ll ever want…The seed fund will assist us give attention to product, progress 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,” mentioned Kumar.
Mother and father too use the app to ship cash to their kids, and to watch their spending and saving habits. Picture Credit: Zywa
The strategic partnerships Zywa is exploring, embrace 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 promote on the app, along with low cost partnerships with manufacturers which might be widespread with Gen Z.
Zywa additionally plans to introduce a social factor to its app by enabling its customers to share images or movies of their purchases, and to react to their buddies’ purchases on totally different feeds.
The fintech can also be including community-based value-add providers 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 people who save, price range and make investments their cash.
“Our reward system “Zems (Zywa gems) and Zyons (Zywa cash)” rewards customers for wholesome monetary habits and are at present 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 instantly by way of the tokens, eliminating scheme involvement by way of a closed-loop system, thus including further income streams for us,” Hashem, informed Fintech.
Zywa earns from card interchange income, and thru service provider or model partnerships.