NextPay gets funding from Y Combinator

Filipino financial technology startup NextPay has raised $125,000 from a backing round from Silicon Valley-based startup accelerator Y Combinator, allowing it to further expand its services that are tailored for the financially-underserved businesses in the Philippines.

NextPay Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder Don Pansacola said this pre-seed investment makes NextPay one of the first five Filipino tech start-ups to be backed and selected by Y Combinator along with Kalibrr, PayMongo, Avion School, and Dashlabs.ai.

Based in Silicon Valley, Y Combinator has helped launch successful startups such as Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, and Twitch, among many others.

“Our goal is to empower smaller businesses with a spectrum of banking services that were previously unavailable to them because of the steep requirements and high fees that are typically aimed at larger, more developed companies that can afford them. This funding round from Y Combinator allows us to scale even faster to bring digital financial services closer to MSMEs,” Pansacola said.

NextPay is an online platform that enables growing businesses to make financial transactions without the rigid requirements that are usually set for big corporations. It currently offers its clients financial services such as digital invoicing, cash management, and batch payments to any bank or e-wallet in the Philippines. The pre-seed funding, Pansacola said, will allow NextPay to introduce more services that are suited for small and medium businesses, including freelancers.

“We plan to introduce more payment acceptance methods, virtual credit cards, and other digital solutions that enable businesses to manage their cash flow and alleviate the bottlenecks of the Philippine financial landscape. We will also partner with human resource and accounting software companies to further streamline the financial operations of a growing company,” Pansacola said.  Launched in 2020, NextPay has processed over $2.5 million digital transactions for over a hundred businesses, helping them cut processing times from as much as three days to just 30 minutes.