Startups have one goal - to 🚀🚀🚀.

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Traditionally, however, startups have had to face large delays prior to launch due to the need to build infrastructure and core backend functionalities in-house, such as the acceptance of payments. This takes up valuable resources, and shrinks the amount of time developers have to build the startup’s core product/service. 

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Realizing this issue is faced by every startup and can be commoditized, many infrastructure-as-a-service / API-first startups emerged, enabling startups to outsource these core functionalities and add them via third-party integrations, making their path to market faster and easier. This phenomenon has especially been prominent in fintech, with global examples including Stripe offering startups an integration for payments, Plaid for banking and Marqeta for card issuing. This has also transcended over to the region, with startups such as Telr, Lean Technology and Nymcard mirroring the global comparables.

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However, as startups today have increased their dependence on these third-party services, they face some friction - while individual integrations may be as easy as adding a few lines of code, integrating with and managing multiple APIs from multiple vendors is cumbersome. This has led to a second wave of infrastructure-led startups, like MoneyHash, a Nuwa portfolio company.

MoneyHash operates a super API platform that aggregates APIs of payment and fintech solutions, banks, and third-party services in emerging markets, starting with MEA. This allows merchants to integrate with various APIs through a single connection, resulting in streamlined operations via time and cost savings.

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For Episode 17 of our podcast, we chatted with Nader Abdelrazik, cofounder of MoneyHash. We dug into the MoneyHash culture, the challenges faced by regional startups with payments and how the MoneyHash platform helps solve them.

Arnav Danthi is Senior Associate at Nuwa Capital