Sanjar Samiev

In the wholesale districts of Dubai, the arithmetic of B2B commerce is simple and unkind. A manufacturer ships goods. Waits sixty, seventy, sometimes ninety days to collect payment. Then covers the gap with overdrafts, deferred wages, and contracts it cannot afford to decline. Sanjar Samiev had spent years operating inside that world. As co-founder of Wing.ae, a Dubai-based delivery marketplace that Souq.com acquired in 2017, he had moved through the UAE supply chain at street level, watching the same small suppliers that kept the logistics economy running quietly absorb a working-capital deficit that no platform was designed to address.

The Logistics Co-Founder Who Learned to Read the Invoice

Samiev co-founded Wing.ae in Dubai in 2016, alongside Muzaffar Karabaev. The company was a logistics marketplace, built to route same-day and next-day deliveries through a network of couriers and merchants at the moment e-commerce was beginning to rewire consumption across the Gulf. Within months of launch, in July 2016, Wing.ae secured seed funding from Souq.com, then one of the region's largest online retail platforms. Roughly eight months later, in March 2017, Amazon announced it would acquire Souq for $580 million, a deal that closed by the middle of that year.

Wing.ae was building the last-mile infrastructure Amazon needed to extend Prime-style delivery into a region it did not yet have the operational depth to serve. The timing was precise. By September 2017, Souq had acquired Wing.ae entirely, folding its delivery network into the Amazon logistics infrastructure then taking shape across the UAE.

The acquisition placed Samiev inside the inner logic of how goods moved through the UAE supply chain, and how money consistently did not. The suppliers feeding that network, the manufacturers producing the inventory, the small businesses keeping the logistics economy alive, were operating on a structural delay. They shipped goods in days. They waited months to be paid. In between, they financed the gap themselves, borrowing against receivables they had already earned at rates that compressed already-thin margins.

Every same-day delivery appears seamless from the consumer's side. What it conceals is a chain of working-capital obligations where the smallest participants absorb the most risk, and where the payment delay is not an anomaly but a design feature of relationships between unequal counterparties. Samiev spent the years after the Wing.ae acquisition examining that design. By 2023, he had a thesis sharp enough to build around.

The Founder Who Attacked the Invoice Instead of the Marketplace

The obvious move after a clean exit was another marketplace. The UAE logistics and e-commerce ecosystem was still growing. The region was hungry for founders with proven track records. Samiev had a network. He had credibility. He could have built again in a category he already understood.

Instead, alongside his co-founders, he founded Comfi in 2023 with a narrower and harder bet: fix the cash-flow layer between suppliers and buyers in the B2B supply chain, not the marketplace layer sitting on top of it.

The product Comfi built was a B2B embedded finance platform. Its core mechanism was direct: an SME supplier could offer up to ninety days of payment terms to its buyers while receiving payment from Comfi within twenty-four hours. Comfi absorbed the credit risk, collected a fee, and used AI-driven underwriting to reach the credit decision, in the company's account, faster and with more current data than a traditional bank branch review. The supplier received payment. The buyer received terms. Comfi held the invoice.

The conviction underlying the bet was specific. Samiev described the operational reality the product was designed to address: a supplier waiting sixty or more days to be paid cannot invest in inventory, hire the people it needs, or take on the contracts available to it. The gap does not present itself as a financing problem. It presents as survival.

Invoice discounting and trade finance are not new categories. What Samiev wagered on was the embedding: inserting the financing into the workflow where the invoice already existed, rather than asking the SME to approach a lender separately.

The first independent confirmation that the model worked came in June 2024, when Comfi secured a $5 million debt facility from an Abu Dhabi-based private family office. The amount was small. The signal was not: a sophisticated investor had reviewed the underwriting approach and found it sound enough to lend against.

The Invoice as Data Layer

What Comfi built over the following two years was not primarily a lending product. It was a credit-decision database.

Every invoice Comfi processed added data: about the buyer, the seller, the sector, the timing of repayment, the patterns that separate a business managing its obligations from one approaching stress. By April 2026, when the company announced its $65 million pre-Series A, Comfi had processed over fifteen thousand invoices, served more than one thousand clients, and worked with over four thousand finance leaders across the UAE. The behavioral data beneath those transactions was, in the company's telling, the asset a bank would struggle to acquire from scratch without running comparable volume at comparable operational cost over a comparable period.

The $65 million round reflected two distinct structures. The equity portion, led by Iliad Partners with participation from Yango Ventures and Raw Ventures, priced the platform and its growth trajectory. The debt component, a credit facility from Partners for Growth combined with a mezzanine facility structured by Shorooq, priced the loan book itself. Both sides of the round were effectively underwriting the same thesis: that Comfi could make sharper credit decisions about UAE SMEs than the incumbents serving them, at a speed and cost structure those incumbents would find hard to match.

Samiev described the structural inefficiency the data layer was designed to close. SMEs in the region routinely finance their own customers, shipping goods and providing services on credit while waiting thirty to ninety days or more to receive payment. The pressure is sharpest in sectors like fast-moving consumer goods, where high inventory turnover and compressed margins leave almost no room to absorb the delay. Banks serving these businesses rely on backwards-looking financial statements. Comfi relies on the invoice, which reflects what is actually happening in the business rather than what can be presented at the end of a reporting period.

The capital from the pre-Series A was directed toward Saudi Arabia, one of the region's largest economies and a market where Samiev saw the SME working-capital gap as both pronounced and underserved. Comfi was not introducing a new product for the Saudi expansion. It was replicating the invoice layer it had already built in the UAE, extending the same credit-decision infrastructure into a new set of supplier-buyer relationships where the underlying problem was identical and the incumbents equally slow.

The Invoice Is the Trust Layer

The insight Comfi encodes is compact: working capital is a trust problem dressed as a liquidity problem.

Banks across the UAE and MENA have consistently failed to serve the SME segment at meaningful scale. The failure is not a shortage of capital. It is the cost and inaccuracy of credit decisions made without real-time data about how SMEs actually operate. A bank branch visit produces a balance sheet and a set of projections. Comfi's invoice produces something different: a record of how a business behaves in the market, who it ships to, when counterparties pay, and how it manages the gap in between. Those records accumulate over months and across relationships. They build a behavioral picture that no loan application can replicate.

When a supplier processes invoices through Comfi over an extended period, across multiple buyer relationships, the platform accumulates credit intelligence that is both specific and current. The SME does not approach Comfi to borrow. It approaches Comfi to get paid on time. The credit relationship is a byproduct of the payment relationship, and that sequence changes the accuracy and cost of the underwriting entirely.

This is the architecture Samiev began to understand from inside the Wing.ae supply chain before he had the vocabulary to describe it. The delivery platform taught him that trust between buyers and sellers in UAE commerce was real but fragile, that it did not survive the payment delay, and that the party willing to absorb the delay would own the relationship. Comfi owns the invoice. In a market where SMEs represent the operational backbone of the UAE's non-oil economy, the invoice layer is the trust layer. Samiev is building it one transaction at a time.