{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"FWDstart","title":"Comfi's Sanjar Samiev and Denis Gavrilin on Raising $65M and Building B2B BNPL for MENA's SMEs","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":2638,"description":"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.\nSanjar 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.\nWhat 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.\nDenis, 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.\nWe cover:\n– 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.\n– 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.\n– How Comfi underwrites a business in hours rather than weeks, with almost no human in the loop, and what that speed actually unlocks.\n– 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.\n– 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.\n– How the $65 million raise actually works, why a lending business has to run two completely different fundraises in parallel, and how...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/rw5tuXzSlVVTIYGhONUr8fUF7P47ZEBy7HgU8S4OYCc/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9iY2M5/ZDg1NjgwNzY2YzM0/ODcxOTc5MGEzOWMw/Mzk0OS5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}