Announcing Nomod

👋 I’m excited to officially announce Nomod, an idea that we’ve been quietly working on since early 2019. Nomod is a beautifully easy way for merchants around the world to accept card payments on their phone with no extra hardware.

What started as a consumer banking idea quickly morphed into a business banking play, sensing that there were more challenging problems to solve. We then spent a bunch of time looking at regulatory considerations and figuring out the right starting point, as bringing yet another card and account to market made little sense.

In 2018, we built Lunatap, a side project that allowed anyone to take their Stripe account into the real world. The product got some traction and we kept coming back to it thinking that it could make for an interesting starting point. At some point the realisation hit that over the next decade or so, physical card payments will evolve and consumers will end up with a token on their device, or will use a native wallet. For merchants however, not much has changed. Legacy hardware and contracts remain the norm, but with over a billion iOS devices and multiple billions of Android devices out there, a shift away from clunky, proprietary, 70s style hardware towards experiential, beautifully simple software became our siren call.

We were incredibly privileged to be part of Y Combinator’s S21 batch earlier this summer, which was an inspiring and productive time. We subsequently raised a $3.4 million seed round with participation from Global Founders Capital, Kingsway Capital, Goodwater Capital, and leading angel investors including one of the founders of Careem, an early employee from Dropbox, a partner at DST Global, and from far flung corners of the world including Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, UAE, and the Valley.

Since launching in early March this year, we’re seeing traction across multiple markets including the US, UK and the UAE, have acquired over 4700 merchants, whilst total processed volume has grown 11x since we launched.

Nomod is built and continues to be run by a small, ruthlessly efficient team of nine world class product, engineering, and operations folks, a number of whom have been working together for five years or more, and operate entirely remotely from six different countries. I am incredibly grateful to be able to work alongside each of them, every single day.

If we zoom out and cast an eye towards the future, our ambition is to build a financial operating system for forward thinking businesses. Whether it be holding money, spending money, accepting or making payments, or getting access to capital to grow, our mission is to  empower millions of entrepreneurs and startups around the world to start and grow their businesses with access to better payment tools and financial services, great support, and always striving for better.

If you’re interested in imagining and building the future of financial services in a deeply product focused, fully remote organisation, whilst having real impact and influencing where we go next, we’re hiring! You should also follow us on Twitter

— Omar 🚀