Brandon Timinsky's first act in Pakistani fintech ended with a whimper—layoffs, an abrupt departure, and a sale that left employees reeling. His second act launched just seventeen months later, backed by some of Silicon Valley's most prominent venture firms and aimed squarely at the same market he'd just exited.
The trajectory is unusual, even by the standards of serial entrepreneurship. Timinsky built SadaPay into one of Pakistan's best-funded neobanks, attracted over a million users, then sold the company to Turkish unicorn Papara in mid-2024. Within weeks, he was gone. By October 2025, he'd raised $12.9 million from Andreessen Horowitz and Coinbase Ventures for ZAR, a stablecoin platform targeting—yes—Pakistan's cross-border payment flows.
To understand why requires rewinding to 2021, when SadaPay looked like the next breakout story in South Asian fintech.
A Greenfield Bet
The pitch was seductive in its simplicity. Pakistan: 222 million people, 87% without bank accounts, a massive freelancer economy, and almost no modern digital banking infrastructure. In March 2021, SadaPay closed a $7.2 million seed round led by Recharge Capital, pulling in participation from Kingsway and Raptor Group. The cap table read like a who's-who of fintech believers—Pierpaolo Barbieri, who'd built Argentina's Ualá into a regional powerhouse, and Brian McGrath from Ribbit Capital, the firm behind Robinhood and Coinbase.
Thirteen months later, SadaPay raised another $10.7 million. The company claimed total funding had topped $20 million, making it one of the most capitalized startups in the country. Timing helped. Pakistan's State Bank had just granted SadaPay a full Electronic Money Institution license in April 2022, clearing the way for commercial operations after a pilot that began in late 2020.
Getting regulatory approval in Pakistan is no small feat. The central bank moves cautiously, especially with financial innovation. SadaPay had threaded that needle.
Building for Freelancers
The product itself was standard neobank fare, with a few localized twists. SadaPay partnered exclusively with Mastercard—announced in May 2020—for card issuance and payment processing. By February 2021, the company rolled out what it called the Middle East and Africa region's first numberless debit card, a fraud-prevention feature that had become trendy among Western fintechs.
The wallet offered free local transfers and three free ATM withdrawals monthly. Fees were lower than traditional banks, though not radically so. Where SadaPay differentiated was its focus on Pakistan's freelance economy. Tens of thousands of Pakistanis work remotely for international clients, funneling billions of dollars home annually through expensive wire services like Western Union or informal hawala networks.
In October 2023, SadaPay launched Apple Pay and Google Pay invoicing for its SadaBiz product, letting freelancers bill clients abroad without clunky workarounds. A month later came "Save in USD, Earn in PKR"—a feature allowing users to hold dollar earnings before converting to rupees, hedging against currency volatility. Mastercard expanded the partnership again in January 2024, adding SME debit and credit cards.
By early 2024, SadaPay reported one million users and approximately $1.5 billion in annual payment volume. Respectable numbers for a three-year-old startup operating in a frontier market.
Enter Papara
On May 30, 2024, SadaPay announced it had been acquired—fully, 100% share purchase—by Papara, a Turkish fintech valued at close to $2 billion. Timinsky confirmed the deal to local press but declined to share the price. Industry sources later pegged the valuation somewhere between $30 million and $50.5 million, with Papara committing an additional $10 million in capital.
For context, that's a modest exit. SadaPay had raised over $20 million and operated for four years. Investors likely recovered their capital, perhaps saw a small multiple. Nobody was popping champagne.
Pakistan's Competition Commission approved the transaction on August 13. Papara's public rationale made sense on paper: geographic expansion, a regulatory license, an established user base in South Asia. The SadaPay blog struck an optimistic note. "This acquisition marks a significant milestone for both companies," it read.
What happened next was less milestone, more mess.
Weeks, Not Months
Ten days after announcing the sale, Timinsky resigned as CEO. He sent an email to staff—short, professional—explaining he was stepping back to let Papara operate the company. Omer Salimullah, SadaPay's COO since 2019, stepped into the role on an acting basis.
Then, in early July, came the layoffs. About 30% of the workforce—roughly 80 people—were let go. Multiple senior executives left. Neither SadaPay nor Papara issued a detailed public explanation, though local media framed the cuts as part of Papara's post-acquisition restructuring.
For employees who'd spent years navigating Pakistan's regulatory bureaucracy and building the product from scratch, the timing was brutal. One former staffer, speaking anonymously to a Pakistani tech publication, described the exits as "hasty" and "poorly communicated." Another noted that SadaPay's culture had always felt fragile, held together largely by Timinsky's presence.
The story took another turn in early 2025, when Turkish authorities reportedly launched an investigation into Papara over alleged connections to illegal betting and money-laundering operations. SadaPay wasn't named in the probe—it operates independently in Pakistan—but the headlines were damaging nonetheless.
The Reboot
Timinsky, meanwhile, hadn't disappeared. By late 2025, word began circulating in crypto circles that he was fundraising for something new. In October, ZAR emerged publicly with a $12.9 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Coinbase Ventures came in, along with a handful of fintech angels familiar with South Asian markets.
ZAR's pitch: use stablecoins to facilitate cross-border payments and remittances via blockchain rails, targeting the same Pakistani freelancer demographic SadaPay had courted. The value proposition is straightforward—faster settlement, lower fees, less reliance on correspondent banking infrastructure.
Whether it works is another question. Pakistan's central bank has been deeply skeptical of cryptocurrency, issuing multiple warnings and restricting crypto-related transactions. Stablecoins occupy a gray area—not quite crypto, not quite fiat—but regulators haven't shown much appetite for experimentation.
Timinsky's bet seems to be that regulatory winds will shift, or that he can operate in borderline compliance long enough to prove demand. He's done it before.
What's Left
SadaPay continues to operate under Papara's ownership, serving its million-plus users with a leaner team and Turkish management. The app still works. Freelancers still use it to receive payments. The product hasn't degraded noticeably, though user growth appears to have stalled.
What SadaPay represents now is harder to define. A successful exit? Technically, yes—Papara bought the company, investors got liquidity. A cautionary tale? Perhaps. The layoffs and founder departure suggest the integration didn't go as smoothly as either side hoped.
For Timinsky, the SadaPay chapter closed quickly. His willingness to jump back into the same market with a different thesis—less neobanking, more crypto infrastructure—reveals something about his temperament. Serial founders often move fast, sometimes before the dust from the last venture has settled.
Whether stablecoins can solve what neobanking couldn't remains to be seen. Pakistan's remittance flows are massive and inefficient. If ZAR can navigate the regulatory minefield and build distribution, there's a real opportunity. If not, Timinsky may find himself explaining another messy exit.
The pattern, at least, is becoming clear.
