The Comparable

Did you know that despite crypto being banned in Pakistan in 2018, Pakistan has *still* become the 3rd largest cryptocurrency market in the world, with over 40 million users holding crypto accounts in the country?The Pakistan government, in response to this significant demand, responded with launching the Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority, or PVARA, in an effort to create an enabling environment for this evolving space.In this episode of The Comparable, we sit down with Mariam Saleem, who is a lawyer in Pakistan who has built one of Pakistan’s first dedicated virtual assets regulatory practices. We discuss the significance of PVARA and what it means for the future of virtual assets in Pakistan, how Pakistan’s regulatory framework compares to other emerging markets, and the blind spots we still need to look out for. It’s a great conversation that hopefully anyone new to this space can learn from.

We’re spotlighting two players who have been successful in digitizing ROSCAs or Rotating Savings and Credit Associations– MoneyFellows in Egypt and Oraan in Pakistan. Moneyfellows, founded by Ahmed Wadi, was founded in 2016 and is now a profitable company that raised their $13M pre-Series C round in 2025, and has plans to grow from Egypt to Morroco this year. They’ve expanded beyond their digital ROSCA product (known as gemaya in Egypt) to launching cards and other financial products.Oraan launched in Pakistan in 2018, founded by Halima Iqbal. Oraan digitized ROSCAs, known as committees, as a way to provide an inclusive financial product in a country where women are often excluded from the formal financial system. They grew this product significantly, and then launched Oraan Gold in late 2025 which lets users buy fractional gold. In just seven months, their gold product grew 75x, just scratching the surface of what could be possible.We talk about what each company has learned from its customers, where the models converge and diverge, what it takes to build financial trust at scale, and what the future of inclusive consumer fintech could look like across emerging markets.

We're breaking down a growing asset class that is vital in emerging markets but doesn't get nearly enough airtime: venture debt. Every founder knows the equity story — raise a round, give up ownership, repeat, until you hopefully have some big exit that returns money back to you & your investors. But there's a whole other playbook, one where you extend runway, fund growth, and protect your cap table without selling another piece of the company. In markets like India, venture debt has become a genuine growth engine for startups, and has been a growing industry, reflective of the growth of the venture capital space overall. In 2025, India’s venture debt market reached $1.3 billion via 187 deals, a big increase from $80M in 2018 with just 56 deals. There’s much to learn from the venture debt evolution in India, especially for more nascent markets like Pakistan.There's no better person to unpack it than our guest Punit Shah, Managing Partner at Alteria Capital — India's largest venture debt fund, with well over half a billion dollars under management and a portfolio that includes names like Zepto, Infra.Market, and Dunzo. Before Alteria, Punit spent years at InnoVen Capital building some of the earliest venture debt relationships in the country. Very few people have watched this asset class grow up quite like he has, and we break down the space and his lessons in this episode.

For those who track, follow & invest in emerging markets, Brazil is a North Star. With a population of over 214M, Brazil is considered one of the top performing startup ecosystems in Latin America, and arguably in emerging markets. In 2025, Brazilian startups attracted US$2.03B across 363 deals, representing 52.9% of all LatAm venture funding. It also is a strong hub for fintech in the region, hosting 59% of all Latam fintech startups. It’s also home and headquarters to around 30 unicorns (companies worth $1B or more) – like NuBank, iFood, Gympass, Creditas and more.Rodrigo Baer is the Co-founder & Managing Partner at 14B Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund that invests in startups in Latin America, and in this conversation he shares his perspective on the Brazilian market as well as the LATAM region generally, how it’s evolved, what he’s seeing work and not work, and the lessons you can translate to your market wherever you are in the world.

We’re digging into the very complex and fragmented sector of logistics. Logistics is the backbone of global trade, how we move goods and products across and within borders. Logistics is also quite a wide sector – it can include the movement of freight & cargo, how we store & warehouse goods, and how we transport and deliver it in its last mile. For this episode, we’ve narrowed it down to a spotlight on trucking and freight. This space is focused on the transportation of goods via heavy-duty trucks over extensive distances, primarily serving manufacturing, retail, and logistics industries.For this episode, we’re spotlighting two players doing exactly that in their respective markets: Truck It In in Pakistan and Cargon, which started out of Georgia but is operating across the region.

dLocal was born out of Uruguay in 2016 with the vision to close the payments innovation gap between international businesses and emerging economies, and over the past 10 years the company grew to reach unicorn status in 2020, went public on the NASDAQ in 2021, and now works across the world in 60 countries with operations in over 44 countries, with over 1000 payment methods.As the company grew and went public, it saw a leadership transition from its original founders, with Pedro Arnt, our guest today, brought in in 2023 first as co-CEO and later as CEO to lead the company in this new chapter. In this episode, we’ll hear more about this transition, how dLocal has grown and evolved over its lifespan and under Pedro’s leadership, what they’ve learned working across emerging markets, and what fintech founders in these economies can learn from this really incredible case study.

We're back with Season 2 of The Comparable, and for episode 1 we're spotlighting two fintech players that are taking their respective markets by storm – Moniepoint, which started their journey in Nigeria, and Abhi, which started in Pakistan.Moniepoint, formerly known as TeamApt, was established in Lagos, Nigeria in 2015, first finding success in launching Point of Sale terminals in 2019 across Nigeria that captured a massive market share because they were reliable, while incumbents were often plagued by network failures. In the last 11 years, Moniepoint has evolved to become one of the African continent’s most important business banking and payments platforms, particularly for small and medium sized businesses. In October 2024, it officially became a unicorn with their $110 million Series C round, and the company is now expanding their footprint in East Africa. Abhi has become a significant fintech player in the MENAP region in just the last 5 years. Founded in 2021, Abhi started as an Earned Wage Access (EWA) player in Pakistan, but that product was just the hook that led to the launch of a number of other financial products, from invoice factoring to payroll processing, to then acquiring FINCA, a microfinance bank in Pakistan, to expanding their presence to the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and now Oman. The company is now raising their Series B round of funding. Both companies built smartly for the nuance of their markets, building outwards from a “hook” product that resonated with their respective customer bases and then layering other products in their offering. Both have scaled outside their initial markets, both have leveraged acquisitions as a strategy in interesting ways and both are now market leaders that have raised significant capital.

Our first season (10 episodes!) is done, and Kals sits down with her partner at i2i Ventures Misbah Naqvi to reflect on major takeaways and how they're applying it to their work at the fund.

Buy Now Pay Later, or BNPL is a short-term installment loan that lets consumers buy a product immediately and spread the cost over several payments, often with no interest if they pay on time. In developed markets, platforms like Klarna, Afterpay and Affirm are well-known BNPL plays, and act as a layer on top of mature credit rails, allowing consumers to shop more seamlessly online. In developed markets, with strong credit infrastructure and a highly banked population, BNPL is a tool of convenience. In emerging markets, with limited credit data and large unbanked or underbanked populations, BNPL can be seen as a tool of financial inclusion. In this episode, we spotlight two companies building robust BNPL companies at scale: Pagaleve in Brazil and Qist Bazaar in Pakistan.

In emerging markets, b2b “business to business” e-commerce platforms service the millions of small retailers and corner shops that power many of these economies. In Africa, the informal retail sector accounts for ~ 90% of transactions in Nigeria, 96% in Ghana & 70% in Kenya. In Latin America, there are over 3.7M corner stores that generate an annual revenue of $330 billion. While these small businesses account for a tremendous amount of transactions and commerce in these markets, these small businesses owners face a number of challenges in staying competitive, with major inefficiencies including fragmented distribution networks, limited access to working capital, unreliable logistics, and a lack of transparency in their supply chains. Digital platforms and marketplaces rose as a way to solve for these inefficiencies, digitizing and streamlining interactions among manufacturers, distributors, and retailers, allowing them to buy and sell goods and services to one another online, instead of through traditional, offline channels. These platforms streamline procurement, logistics, and payments, connecting informal and formal retailers more directly with brands, large suppliers, or manufacturers. This process removes intermediaries, reduces costs, improves efficiency, and often provides additional services such as delivery and credit.For this episode, we are highlighting OmniRetail and Chiper not only as two examples of leading players in this space, but also as two platforms that were asset light from day 1, and have showcased resilience within the highs and lows of the past 5 years. OmniRetail, founded by Deepankar Rustagi in 2019, which was named Africa's fastest-growing company by the Financial Times in both 2024 and 2025. They’ve raised $38 million in equity and debt since their inception.Chiper, founded in 2018 in Colombia by Jose Bonilla, Oscar Sarria Guerrero, and Carolina García, started as a platform and have evolved to become more of a software play, an operating system for retailers across Latin America. They’ve raised over $78 million to date.