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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 Souq (later acquired by 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
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