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FWDstart

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by Jamie Lane

17 episodes

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Podcast Overview

The FWDstart Podcast is a weekly show at the intersection of venture capital, startups, and strategic industries shaping the MENA region. Each episode features candid conversations with founders, investors, and operators behind the region’s most ambitious companies, from frontier AI and fintech infrastructure to climate tech, construction, energy, and space.

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Publishing Since

12/8/2025

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Recent Episodes

June 22, 2026

ClearGrid's Mohammad Al-Khalili on Building AI for a Trillion-Dollar Debt Market

In this episode, we sit down with Mohammad Al-Khalili, co-founder of ClearGrid, the AI debt-resolution company quietly rebuilding one of the least glamorous, most avoided corners of finance. ClearGrid came out of stealth in 2025 with $10 million across pre-seed and seed rounds, co-led by RAED Ventures, BECO Capital and Nuwa Capital, with Aramco's Waed Ventures, KBW Ventures and a string of marquee angels, Replit's Amjad Masad, Twitch's Justin Kan and Marqeta's Jason Gardner among them, also on the cap table.ClearGrid is an outcome-as-a-service business. It doesn't sell software or seats, it gets paid when the lender gets paid, and whether the work is done by AI or humans is, in his words, its problem and not the client's. The thesis underneath it is blunt: debt is broken, the market is enormous, somewhere north of $400 billion and climbing towards the trillions, and almost no one wants to touch it.For Khalili, it's also deeply personal. He had watched debt take its toll on people he loves, and as he puts it, there is no bigger problem worth solving in his life.What began, deliberately, as an old-fashioned debt-collection agency, a way to learn the market from the inside before building anything, has since become a company moving towards buying the debt outright.We cover:– Why AI can be the more dignified debt collector rather than the harsher one, and why, as he puts it, it is not for private companies to decide who deserves empathy and who doesn't. – The deceptively small change that moved the needle most, swapping the word "empathy" for "dignity," and why it lifted both his agents' clarity and the company's customer-satisfaction scores. – Why he flatly refuses to call ClearGrid a voice-AI company, the race to the bottom, the collapse in pickup rates, and why voice is a channel, not a product. – The counterintuitive north star, that like a good doctor, success means the borrower never has to come back, from a founder who came up in growth hacking and retention. – Why better AI underwriting helps rather than threatens the business, and why debt, as old as the first written records we have, isn't going anywhere. – The next act, buying the debt outright, and the first-principles logic of simply taking it off the lender's books.-----------------------------------------------Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction 01:00 - What ClearGrid Is, and Why Debt Is Broken 03:00 - Solving for Both the Lender and the Borrower 04:00 - From Agency, to Tools, to Outcome as a Service 06:00 - The "No Humans" Thesis, and Buying the Debt 08:00 - The First Voice AI Was a Nightmare 10:00 - Why "We Get Paid When You Get Paid" 11:00 - A Short History of Debt, and Why Collection Is Changing 15:00 - Who the Customers Are 17:00 - Why AI Is the Fairer, More Dignified Collector 19:00 - No Ego: Anger, Shame & the Hard Cases 21:00 - Command: A CRM Built for AI, Not Humans 25:00 - Why He Refuses to Build a Voice-AI Company 27:00 - AI Disclosure, and Why It Changes the Game 30:00 - Code-Switching, Arabic & Building Multilingual 33:00 - The Pivot From Empathy to Dignity 40:00 - The Anthropologist in Residence 41:00 - Is There an Existential Threat to ClearGrid? 43:00 - What Keeps Him Up at Night, and the Wrapper Trap 45:00 - "No Bigger Problem Worth Solving in My Life" 49:00 - How AI Is Changing Who Gets to Build 52:00 - 70% of the Code Is Written by AI 53:00 - What's Next: Buying the Debt & Going Global 59:00 - First Principles: Taking Debt Off the Books-----------------------------------------------Transcript: https://share.transistor.fm/s/f7b3053f/transcript.txt-----------------------------------------------Follow Jamie Lane on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamienlane/ Follow Jamie Lane on X: https://x.com/jamienlane Follow Mohammad Al-Khalili on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mohammadalkhalili/Check out Cleargrid: https://www.cleargrid.co/Follow FWDstart on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fwdstart/ Follow FWDstart on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@fwdstart Visit our Website: https://www.fwdstart.me/ Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://www.fwdstart.me/subscribe -----------------------------------------------

June 15, 2026

Comfi's Sanjar Samiev and Denis Gavrilin on Raising $65M and Building B2B BNPL for MENA's SMEs

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 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-----------------------------------------------Transcript: https://share.transistor.fm/s/a3261efc/transcript.txt-----------------------------------------------Follow Jamie Lane on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamienlane/ Follow Jamie Lane on X: https://x.com/jamienlane Follow Sanjar Samiev on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjar-s-65146676/Follow Dennis Gavrilin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennis-gavrilin/Check out Comfi: https://comfi.ai/Follow FWDstart on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fwdstart/ Follow FWDstart on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@fwdstart Visit our Website: https://www.fwdstart.me/ Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://www.fwdstart.me/subscribe -----------------------------------------------

Episode thumbnail for Rana Abdel Latif & Deepali Nangia (Speedinvest) on Raising from QIA, EIB, and Mubadala, Why Fintechs Are the New Incumbents, and What Catalytic LPs Actually Do

April 22, 2026

Rana Abdel Latif & Deepali Nangia (Speedinvest) on Raising from QIA, EIB, and Mubadala, Why Fintechs Are the New Incumbents, and What Catalytic LPs Actually Do

In this episode, we sit down with Deepali Nangia and Rana Abdel Latif, the partners leading Speedinvest's first dedicated Middle East and Africa fund, a flagship vehicle for the Vienna-based firm that's been quietly investing across emerging markets since 2013.Earlier this week, Speedinvest announced the fund with anchor commitments from Mubadala (through its MENA Venture Capital Fund), the Qatar Investment Authority (via its newly expanded $3B Fund of Funds programme) and EIB Global, which took the anchor on the Africa-dedicated vehicle with a €40M commitment signed in March. The fund will invest across fintech, embedded finance, health, climate, AI, consumer and digital infrastructure, targeting the Series A and B capital gap that Deepali and Rana have identified across MENAPT and Sub-Saharan Africa.The headlines make it sound like an overnight success, but as Deepali and Rana are quick to admit the reality is that this fundraise has been closer to a three-year marathon. Rana has been investing in the region since 2006, most recently running FinTech investments at Nclude in Cairo. Deepali joined Speedinvest to lead gender investing at the firm and has since become the driving force behind its broader emerging markets thesis, including its Micro GP programme backing female and diverse fund managers.Deepali and Rana are honest about the ups and downs, thoughtful on where capital really needs to flow in Africa and MENA right now, and refreshingly unsparing about the tech bro renaissance that's quietly reversing a lot of DEI progress in European and American VC.We cover:<ul><li>The real fundraising timeline behind the headlines, and why raising from sovereigns and DFIs looks a lot more like an enterprise sales cycle than anything else.</li><li>Why Speedinvest shifted from opportunistic deals across emerging markets to a dedicated regional strategy with boots on the ground.</li><li>The inside story of landing QIA, Mubadala and EIB, and how the sovereign narrative has shifted from "invest in our country" to "what can you bring us from outside."</li><li>Why Series A and B is the real capital gap in Africa, and how they're thinking about complementing equity with debt, callable equity (the NICE facility with STV is the worked example) and potentially securitisation down the line.</li><li>Where the real FinTech opportunities sit, the long tail of underserved SMEs and consumers, the rise of AI-native fintechs rebuilding the plumbing, and why embedded finance in logistics, agriculture and mobility is under-appreciated.</li><li>How AI is changing the economics of running a VC firm, and what a flatter, leaner fund looks like as LPs start squeezing management fees.</li><li>How Rana learned to underwrite currency risk in Egypt across multiple step devaluations, and why you can still make excellent returns if you price the 8 to 10% annual devaluation into your model.</li><li>The tech bro renaissance, why it's quietly reversing progress right now, and what allyship from the top actually looks like in practice.</li></ul>-----------------------------------------------Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 00:50 - Behind the headlines of the fundraise 04:15 - Why shift from opportunistic to a dedicated regional strategy 11:20 - Inside the QIA and Mubadala deals 19:00 - Where the real capital gap sits at Series A and B 22:00 - Innovating the capital stack with STV's NICE facility 24:00 - FinTech, SMEs, and the rise of the AI-native incumbent 27:30 - Why Africa's long tail is the real opportunity 30:00 - Picks and shovels vs AI-native bets 34:00 - How AI is reshaping VC firm economics 36:30 - Pricing currency risk and lessons from Egypt 43:00 - The tech bro renaissance and women in VC-----------------------------------------------Transcript: https://share.transistor.fm/s/00307acd/transcript.txt-----------------------------------------------Follow Jamie Lane on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamienlane/Follow Jamie Lane on X: https://x.com/jamienlaneFollow Rana Abdel Latif on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rana-abdel-latif/Follow Deepali Nangia on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nangianomics/Check out Speedinvest: https://www.speedinvest.com/Follow FWDstart on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fwdstart/ Follow FWDstart on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@fwdstart Visit our Website: https://www.fwdstart.me/ Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://www.fwdstart.me/subscribe -----------------------------------------------

17 total episodes available

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What is FWDstart?: The FWDstart Podcast is a weekly show at the intersection of venture capital, startups, and strategic industries shaping the MENA region. Each episode features candid conversations with founders, investors, and operators behind the region’s most ambitious companies, from frontier AI and fintech infrastructure to climate tech, construction, energy, and space.
How often does this podcast release new episodes?: This podcast updates daily.
Where can I listen to this podcast?: This podcast is available on 4 platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also use the RSS feed directly.
Does this podcast accept guests?: Yes, this podcast regularly features guests.

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