Biography:
Giorgi Tsurtsumia is the co-founder of Payze, a fintech startup helping companies receive online payments, through various APIs and no-code products. Payze was founded in Georgia and is now active in Uzbekistan. It was part of Y-Combinator’s summer 2021 batch.
Why was Payze the first, major mover in this geography?
The need for digital payments in our region emerged later than in the West because digitization emerged later as well. There’s about a ten year lag. Here, the market for digital payment took off around the 2010s.
When the need came about, the only players capable of building payment infrastructure were banks (Tinkoff and its daughter company Cloud Payments in Russia, Kaspi in Kazakhstan, Monobank in Ukraine…) But the region remained fragmented and these players already had a lot on their plate. None of them developed fintech products for the region as a whole. VC funding and tech startups were virtually non-existent back then, so few startups were active. There was a blatant gap.
Timing-wise, Payze was lucky. My co-founder and I ran into the need for a localized, modern stack of digital payment tools while building our previous e-commerce businesses. We started Payze in 2019 and became the first Georgian startup to get into YC. The resulting funding and network gave us a competitive advantage. YC saw that we were targeting one of the “last frontiers” in the digital payments space.
Digital payments is Stripe’s business. Why haven’t they expanded to your markets?
Stripe still has a ton of value and upside to capture in its existing markets. It’s far from having conquered them entirely.
In 2020, Stripe acquired Nigeria’s Paystack (the “Stripe for Africa”) for $200M. This might show that Stripe has a desire to enter new, difficult markets through acquisition rather than flat-out expansion.
Lastly, building digital payments infrastructure in our markets is difficult. National markets are small but national regulations differ. I bet that Stripe’s choice not to expand to the Caucusus/Central Asian market is a matter of the hassle not being worth it. For now at least.
What is Payze’s main client persona?