Karachi's NED University Alum Raises $100 Million For Silicon Valley FinTech Startup

Pakistani-American serial entrepreneur and NED alumnus Dr. Safwan Shah has raised $100 million in Series C funding for his financial technology (fintech) startup PayActiv Inc. based in Silicon Valley, California. The round was led by Eldridge Wealth Ltd, a venture capital firm headquartered in Greenwich, Connecticut. PayActiv currently has a 200 member development team in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Dr. Safwan Shah, CEO PayActiv Inc.

PayActiv allows employees to draw accumulated pay or wages in real-time before the end of the pay period. Funds are moved to the employees bank account or card instantly. Unbanked employee can even get cash through a Walmart partnership. Employees can pay bills, call Uber, start savings, get financial coaching and much more. This fintech startup offers a low-cost alternative to Pay Day lenders and other financial institutions that charge employees exorbitant fees and high interest rates for loans against future paychecks. Safwan Shah's startup is solving a real economic problem faced by millions of poor Americans. PayActiv is serving more over 4 million employees at more than 1,000 businesses across retail, food services, business processing services, and over 400 senior living and healthcare businesses. Its clients include Walmart, Wayfair, Ibex Global and many others. Here's how Dr. Safwan Shah, CEO and Co-Founder of PayActiv, describes his business:

“American families are facing more financial stress than they have in generations. The timing gap between work and wages is the main reason workers get hit with punitive late fees, overdraft fees and other penalties. Cumulatively, these fees reduce wages by seven percent every month. The PayActiv platform is the only system where everyone wins: employers lift worker morale with little to no cost and huge dividends; employees get wages when they actually need them most; and cash re-enters the economy faster, making communities financially healthier.”

Dr. Safwan Shah graduated with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from NED University of Engineering in Karachi, Pakistan in 1985. After coming to the United States in 1989, Safwan received his Masters and Ph.D. degrees from University of Colorado at Boulder in 1990 and 1994 respectively.

Safwan started Infonox, a payment platform company, in 2005 and sold it to TSYS in 2008 for an undisclosed amount. He then started PayActiv in 2012.

NED University alumni Idris Kothari and Saeed Kazmi are among the early pioneering duo in the world of technology startups in Silicon Valley. Since 1980s, they have started, built and sold several technology companies, including VPNet, Silicon Design and VIA Technology. They are currently running Vertical Systems Inc. which has a development center in Pakistan.

Safwan Shah is one of the most successful entrepreneurs of Pakistani origin in Silicon Valley. Safwan Shah's startup is solving a real economic problem faced by millions of poor Americans.  Like another successful NED alum Ashraf Habibullah of Computers and Structures Inc. (CSI), Safwan is also very generous with his time and money for NED University Alumni Association activities in Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the United States and the world. Safwan and Ashraf are among a handful of NED alumni in San Francisco Bay Area who have done very well and made fellow NED alumni take pride in their alma mater. Other successful NED alumni in Silicon Valley include Raghib Husain (Cavium/Marvel), Naveed Sherwani (SiFive), Rehan Jalil (Securiti.ai) and Khalid Raza (Viptela). They all serve to inspire NEDians everywhere.

Here's a video of Safwan Shah speaking at a Conscious Capitalism CEO Summit:

https://youtu.be/BF01dG-ikug





Related Links:

Haq's Musings

South Asia Investor Review

Pakistani-American VC Asad Jamal Invested Early in Baidu

Pakistani Students Win First Place in Stanford Design Contest

Pakistanis Win AI Family Challenge in Silicon Valley

Pakistani Gamer Wins ESPN E-sports Player of the Year Award

Pakistan's Expected Demographic Dividend

Pakistan's Research Output Growing Fastest in the World

AI Research at NED University Funded By Silicon Valley NEDians

Pakistan Hi-Tech Exports Exceed A Billion US Dollars in 2018 

Pakistan Becomes CERN Member

Pakistani Tech Unicorns

Rising College Enrollment in Pakistan

Pakistani Universities Listed Among Asia's Top 500 Jump From 16 to 23 in One Year

Pakistani Students Win Genetic Engineering Competition

Human Capital Growth in Pakistan

Pakistan Joins 3D Print Revolution

Pakistan Human Development in Musharraf Years

Robotics Growth in Pakistan 

Riaz Haq's YouTube Channel

PakAlumni Social Network

Two Pakistani Start-ups Accepted in Silicon Valley Immersion Program

Lahore-based Groopic and Islamabad-based Tunacode have been accepted to be part of this summer’s Blackbox Connect program in Silicon Valley.

Founded by Pakistanis, both companies are start-ups with innovative products whose founding teams are looking to live, learn and network for two weeks at an Atherton mansion this summer from July 15 to 26, 2013.  These young entrepreneurs are a reflection of Pakistan's growing human capital.

This year's summer program of Blackbox Connect is supported by Google.

Groopic is an application that helps put the photographer back into photos with his or her buddies. Eyedeus, the company behind Groopic, emerged from the first batch of companies at Plan9, the Punjab government’s incubator which is named after an operating system project at the Bell Labs in the 1980s.

Tunacode specializes in optimizing complex software to graphic processing units (GPUs).

The two Pakistani companies are among eight non-US start-ups selected to participate this summer by Google for Entrepreneurs partner programs around the world. The remaining six companies are Avocarrot (UK), EgzoTech (Poland), Inpris (Israel), Instabug (Egypt), Melusyn (France) and MyDoorHandle (South Africa).  Here's how Blackbox Connect describes the program:

"Founders will come to Silicon Valley and live at the Blackbox Mansion for the two weeks, where they will have the opportunity to live and collaborate with like-minded entrepreneurs from all around the world and take part in an intense agenda of meetings and workshops with entrepreneurs, investors, experts and executives. Accepted startups must have launched a technology based MPV and gathered feedback from early adopter/customers. Ideally - but not required - a startup should have raised some investment capital, have a team between 3 to 20 people and have a product or service that can be launched globally".

Here's the curriculum for this year's program:

1. Interfacing with an Investor

Top Ten Mistakes Made in Business Plans
Short Building Elevator Pitching Preparation and Workshop
Perfecting Your Investor Pitch
How to Hold an Investor Meeting
Recruiting and Leveraging an Advisory Board

2. Basics of Venture Capital Investment Options

Founder Vesting Equity
Stock Options for Startup Founders
Introduction to Equity Term Sheets

3. Born-Global Startups

Building the Core Team, Recruiting and Scaling
UX-based Branding
Raising Money in Silicon Valley
First Hand Founders Success Stories
Leveraging Social Marketing
Setting up official US presence for international startup
Legal & Financial Issues of Born-Global Startups

4. Quality Networking Events

Dinners at Blackbox Mansion with local SV community members
Attend other select happening events in Silicon Valley
Demo/Pitch event to investors followed by dinner event

I believe the exposure to Silicon Valley start-up culture via the Blackbox Connect's immersion program can help founders of participating companies to emulate the success of some of the big-name world-renowned companies that have spawned the technology revolution sweeping the world.

Related Links:

Haq's Musings

Two Pakistani-American Start-ups Among Top 5 Venture Deals 

Pakistan's Growing Human Capital

Pakistani-American's Game-Changing Vision 

Minorities Are Majority in Silicon Valley 

US Promoting Venture Capital & Private Equity in Pakistan

Pakistani-American Population Growth Second Fastest Among Asian-Americans 

Edible Arrangements: Pakistani-American's Success Story

Pakistani-American Elected Mayor 

Upwardly Mobile Pakistan

US Firms Adding Jobs Overseas 

Pakistan's Demographic Dividend 

Pakistanis Study Abroad

Pakistan's Youth Bulge

Pakistani Diaspora World's 7th Largest

Pakistani-American NFL Team Owner 

Pakistani-American Entrepreneurs Catch the Wave

Pakistani Graduation Rate Higher Than India's

2 Pakistani-American Startups Among Top 5 Silicon Valley VC Deals

Latest funding of Ashar Aziz's FireEye and Zia Yusuf's Streetline rank #1 and #4 among top 5 VC deals in Silicon Valley announced in January 2013, according to Silicon Valley Business Journal.

FireEye is riding high on a wave of growing cyber security concerns amidst increasing cyber attacks being reported almost daily from around the globe. FireEye's founder Asgar Aziz is among the top recognized experts in the field of Internet and computer security. With the recent $50 million round from top investors, the company has raised $100 million to date. The new funding comes from new and existing investors — including Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, Goldman Sachs, Juniper Networks, Silicon Valley Bank, and others.

Streetline is offering smartphone applications to help drivers find the increasingly scarce parking spots in crowded places. The company bills itself as "the leading provider of smart parking solutions to cities, garages, airports, universities and other private parking providers". The company has raised $25 million in January, 2013 from True Ventures, with participation by new investors Qualcomm Ventures and Citi and existing investors Sutter Hill Ventures, RockPort Capital Partners and Fontinalis Partners. The company has now raised a total of $40 million, and it says it recently obtained a $25 million credit facility from Citi, too.

Another Pakistani-American who has been in the news is Rayid Ghani who served as the Chief Scientist in President Obama's re-election campaign organization. Before joining the Obama Campaign, Ghani worked for Accenture as Chief Scientist  and developed tools to mine mountains of private data of client corporations to find statistical patterns that could forecast consumer behavior. Instead of just using Facebook for posting messages and tracking its followers’ feelings, Ghani's team turned social media into a tool for efficiently recruiting the human resources it needed leading into the election’s home stretch.

Using Ghani's tools, the Obama campaign was able to match up supporters’ friends' profiles with voting lists and decide how it should reach out to supporters to reach their friends through micro-targeting. If someone was going to spread a message to 10 people, the campaign wanted to ensure they reached 10 people most likely to take actions such as donate money, get active knocking on doors or even to switch sides.

Pakistani-Americans Ashar, Ghani, Zia and many other entrepreneurs and professionals like them from Asia represent a dramatic shift in   Silicon Valley's racial mix over the last few  decades. I have been a witness to this historic change. When I arrived here to join Intel in 1981, there were few non-whites in the Valley. In fact, I was the only nonwhite person in a picture of the six-member award winning Intel 80386 CPU design team which was published by the PC Magazine in 1988.

Standing L to R: Riaz Haq, Jan Prak, Gene Hill, Pat Gelsinger, John Crawford

     Sitting: Dave Vannier

My experience of the demographic changes in this high-tech valley is not just anecdotal. It's supported by data compiled by the local San Jose Mercury newspaper in 2010. The data shows that 49% of Intel employees are now Asian, a full 7% more than whites. In Silicon Valley, the difference is even more pronounced with Asians accounting for 53.9% of the employees versus 37.6% white workers.
 

 With Asians accounting for just 15.5% of the high-tech work force nationally, Silicon Valley's high-tech racial mix is also very different from the rest of the country. Silicon valley's employee pool also differs in terms of under-representation of Blacks, Hispanics and women relative the national averages.

 Among Asian-Americans, Pakistani-Americans are the 7th largest community in America, according to a report titled "A Community of Contrasts Asian Americans in the United States: 2011" published by Asian-American Center For Advancing Justice.  Pakistani-American population has doubled from 204,309 in 2000 to 409,163 in 2010, the second largest percentage increase after Bangladeshis' 157% increase in the same period.

The total fertility rate in the United States is now at 2.06, just enough to maintain the current level of US population. It's possible mainly due to the history of relatively liberal US immigration policy. If US immigration policy is tightened in response to pressures from various labor organizations and the traditional anti-immigration groups, the US fertility rate is likely to dip and hurt the US economy which needs more workers to pay for the retiree benefits of the growing population of senior citizens. Already, many US multinational corporations have added 1.5 million workers to their payrolls in Asia and the Pacific region from 1999 to 2009, and 477,500 workers in Latin America, according to US Commerce Dept data as reported by the Wall Street Journal. If the businesses can not find workers in the United States, they are more likely to continue to accelerate moving jobs elsewhere, depriving the US government the revenue it needs to balance its budget.

Related Links:

Haq's Musings

Pakistani-American's Game-Changing Vision 

Minorities Are Majority in Silicon Valley 

US Promoting Venture Capital & Private Equity in Pakistan

Pakistani-American Population Growth Second Fastest Among Asian-Americans

Edible Arrangements: Pakistani-American's Success Story

Pakistani-American Elected Mayor

Upwardly Mobile Pakistan

US Firms Adding Jobs Overseas 

Pakistan's Demographic Dividend

Pakistanis Study Abroad

Pakistan's Youth Bulge

Pakistani Diaspora World's 7th Largest

Pakistani-American NFL Team Owner

Pakistani-American Entrepreneurs Catch the Wave

Pakistani Graduation Rate Higher Than India's