Comfi's Founders on Raising $65M and Building B2B BNPL for MENA's SMEs

In this episode, we sit down with Sanjar Samiev and Denis Gavrilin, co-founders of Comfi, the B2B buy-now-pay-later platform that recently raised a $65 million pre-Series A to finance the invoices the rest of the market would rather ignore. Sanjar arrived in the UAE back in 2006, built a last-mile delivery business that exited to Amazon, then ran a manufacturing company, which is where he came face to face with the problem he's spent the last two years solving: suppliers across the region extending credit they can't really afford, waiting up to ninety days to get paid, and quietly turning into a finance department they never signed up to run. What began as a way to finance SaaS subscriptions has since become something far broader, an AI-underwritten credit rail for the traditional trade economy, now serving more than a thousand SMEs across the UAE and Saudi. Denis, Comfi's CFO and a former banker, takes us under the bonnet of the numbers: how a lender actually gets funded, and why a raise like this is as much about debt as it is about equity. We cover: – Why B2B buy-now-pay-later has almost nothing in common with the consumer version beyond the name, and why borrowing that name turned out to be an asset rather than a liability. – Why roughly 60% of invoices in the GCC get paid late, and what that does to a supplier forced to act as their own credit and collections team. – How Comfi underwrites a business in hours rather than weeks, with almost no human in the loop, and what that speed actually unlocks. – Why Comfi deliberately chases the smallest cheques, the hundred-dirham invoices everyone else considers too small to bother with, and why that's the moat rather than the compromise. – Why the banks structurally can't serve this market, and why a $120 billion financing gap has room for far more players than most people assume. – How the $65 million raise actually works, why a lending business has to run two completely different fundraises in parallel, and how equity quietly unlocks several times its value in debt. – Why getting in at the hundred-dirham stage is the long game, and how Comfi plans to grow with its customers as they scale. ----------------------------------------------- Timestamps: 00:00 - Cold Open 01:00 - What B2B BNPL Is, and Why It's Nothing Like the Consumer Kind 02:00 - Does BNPL's Bad Reputation Help or Hurt? 03:00 - The Supplier's Problem: 90-Day Terms & Late Invoices 05:00 - Starting With SaaS, Then Pivoting to Trade 06:00 - From Wingy to Amazon, to Manufacturing 10:00 - First Funding: 500 Global, Sanabil & a Family Office 12:00 - AI Underwriting in Hours, Not Weeks 14:00 - Why Banks Won't Touch This Market 15:00 - The Case for the Smallest Cheques 17:00 - Distribution: Where Comfi Finds Its Customers 23:00 - Inside the $65M Pre-Series A 26:00 - How Equity Unlocks Debt 28:00 - Competition & the $120 Billion Gap 31:00 - What Keeps Him Up at Night 35:00 - Saudi, Latam & Going Global 38:00 - The Dream: Underwriting in 15 Seconds 40:00 - Spending the Money & What's Next ----------------------------------------------- Transcript: https://share.transistor.fm/s/a3261ef... ----------------------------------------------- Follow Jamie Lane on LinkedIn:   / jamienlane   Follow Jamie Lane on X: https://x.com/jamienlane Follow Sanjar Samiev on LinkedIn:   / sanjar-s-65146676   Follow Dennis Gavrilin on LinkedIn:   / dennis-gavrilin   Check out Comfi: https://comfi.ai/ Follow FWDstart on Instagram:   / fwdstart   Follow FWDstart on TikTok:   / fwdstart   Visit our Website: https://www.fwdstart.me/ Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://www.fwdstart.me/subscribe -----------------------------------------------