OUR FOUNDER OF THE WEEK- Hana Zaghloul, co-founder and head of commercial at Dayra (LinkedIn).

My name is Hana Zaghloul, and I’m the newly appointed co-founder and head of commercial at Dayra. I graduated from SOAS University with a law degree, fully intending to be a human rights lawyer. I instead decided to start working in content creation, since all the law jobs available to me were commercial law (something I knew I did not want to pursue). I began working at RiseUp and producing the RiseUp agenda, which got me interested in tech and the impact that it can have on society. I later went on to become part of a founding team of four that created Waya. We wanted to create a platform for stories on startups and founders coming out of the MENA region, since we really believed in the impact they could have. As part of my role as head of content, I would frequently cover fintech startups which helped me decide that I wanted to join one.

While searching for work in fintech in September 2020 I met Omar Ekram, the CEO of Dayra. We went out for coffee and ended up talking about his vision for Dayra for two hours, and I was immediately sold on his idea and became the company’s first hire. I really saw the potential impact Dayra could have on the lives of mns of unbanked individuals and businesses in Egypt. Making a positive impact (no matter how small) on people’s lives was the main reason I had studied law.

Much of the Egyptian population is unbanked and still doesn’t have access to financial services. At Dayra we believe credit and access to finance are huge economic drivers, so we aim to provide an easy way for companies to access finance directly and empower them to offer financial services to their unbanked supply of workers and businesses. We do this through our dashboard and embedded financial solutions or what we call our Financial OS. We’re looking to achieve this by working closely with banks and VCs, with the support of the Central Bank of Egypt and the Financial Regulatory Authority.

Dayra is also partnering with marketplaces and platforms to create alternative credit scores and provide financial solutions to their unbanked workers and customers. We allow kiosks and retailers to access credit to buy inventory and unbanked workers to access their wages early. Dayra does all this through APIs and embedded widgets.

We’re a white label solution: Our partners get to take our products and integrate them into their own apps. They can also use our app, which is launching soon, to offer those services. In this regard we are a very incognito startup.

As the head of a commercial department that overlooks communications, operations and partnerships, my KPIs constantly change. A couple of things that I constantly look into though, is how fast we close a partnership and then how fast we actually execute. My law background has given me a lot of confidence in negotiating contracts, which we do quite a lot of as we constantly enter partnerships. I’m also always looking at our revenues. At Dayra one of the main things that we were very adamant on is always being profitable. The idea of burning to grow that a lot of startups subscribe to is not one of the things that we followed.

If I had only enough money to do one thing, I would definitely spend it on improving our product. I wish we had all the time in the world to just keep improving it, but with startups you just have to ship the product out fast and then keep reiterating and improving.

To date, Dayra has raised USD 3 mn in our pre-seed round. Our main investors are VentureSouq, Efg EV, EFG Hermes, Y Combinator as well as Tanmeyah Capital, along with a few angel investors. We’re always in the pursuit of raising debt, as is required by our business model, but we’re also hoping to start fundraising before the end of the year.

I think that there are more women in tech now than there were back in 2016 when I was looking for female founders to come up on stage and speak at RiseUp. I definitely would like to see more female entrepreneurs and more founders. It’s something that makes me happy.

In my spare time, I like to get away from Cairo and spend time in nature. I enjoy going to the desert and hiking. I also recharge by spending time with family and friends. I also read a lot and watch documentaries and shows, though I’ve never really gotten into podcasts. I’m currently reading a book called Bonfire of the Vanities, which I’m liking because I enjoy reading about historical incidents that can be linked to things happening today. I recently watched Super Pumped, a mini series about the rise of Uber, and while it was exaggerated, it was very interesting to see how Uber managed to influence so many startups. It is a defining company in the tech world.

Two startups that I think are killing it are Airbnb and Stripe. Stripe is just an incredible company, and I definitely admire the growth they’ve achieved and what they’ve done. I also admire Airbnb, specifically their design elements and how they put design and center of everything that they do. UX there is huge and it’s something that I’m very interested in.