PayMongo - FinTech Company Funded By Y Combinator That Allows Businesses To Accept Payments Of All Types In A Matter Of Minutes

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PayMongo is the first Filipino-owned fintech start-up funded by Y Combinator. The seed round investment of $2.7 million were backed by Silicon Valley investors that included Founders Fund, Peter Thiel, and Stripe, with participation from Global Founders Capital, Soma Capital, and Tinder Co-Founder Justin Mateen. A number of other angel investors also participated in the round. Below is our recent interview with Francis Plaza, CEO and Co-Founder of PayMongo:

Q: For those who have never heard of it, how would you describe PayMongo?

A: The focus of Paymongo is twofold: to help small and medium enterprises, which comprise the bulk of Philippine businesses, do business online and accept payments with ease. The second focus is to make the payment user experience easy and convenient. In a few simple steps, online SMEs can get paid without the traditional tedious process of sending a bank account and requiring the buyer to send a screenshot of their deposit slip, the common practice in the Philippines.

Over the course of our first year of operation, we have onboarded several thousands of SMEs enabling them to use our platform (after going through our Know Your Client process) and start doing business.

While PayMongo was designed to help SMEs accept payments easily, the larger enterprise merchants found that the payment platform can likewise be applied conveniently to their business needs.

As a result, we have a salad bowl of small, medium and enterprise merchants that use our platform on a daily basis to serve the needs of their customers. We now have thousands of merchants of various sizes onboard the PayMongo platform.

In this regard, we believe we are helping increase the GDP of the Philippine internet economy.

Q: Could you explain the function and advantages of PayMongo technology compared to other available similar technologies?

A: PayMongo’s core strength goes beyond just the payment processing aspect of the business. Our goal from the start has always been to build the technology that will enable anyone to start and grow successful businesses online. This means, lowering the barrier to entry by having an easy, fully online KYC and onboarding, easy-to-integrate tools and services, built-in fraud systems and automated, fast payout processes. All these put together abstracts out the complexities of payments from the merchants so they can keep focusing on what they do best.These are also the real-world results that our merchants experience with PayMongo’s technology.

Q: What were the main challenges you faced in developing the service?

A: At the start of the year, we initially planned to do our fundraise by early to mid 2021. We’ve grown so fast over the last couple of months and the level of demand in the market has amplified our value proposition and our product-market fit. The demand has grown insanely higher than we initially expected, and a lot of improvements as well as new products need to be built to support the ever-growing demand for our services. As such, we decided this was the right time to accelerate our product roadmap.

The pandemic did impact on our professional and daily lives. As you know, we all had to make adjustments such as working from home. All these took place while we were negotiating the Series A. But thankfully, our talks went smoothly. The migration of brick and mortar stores and small and medium Filipino businesses to online motivated us to make our services even better because of the urgency to keep the economy running despite the lockdown.