Aria Eghbali, COL & SEAS ’24, Dix Hills, NY
This past summer I had the opportunity to work on a start-up which was operating in the B2B SaaS space, and more specifically, in payment infrastructure. The start-up was Kade Pay, a young venture focused on removing the friction that exists for small businesses to embrace digital payments. The company wanted to move the payment experience away from physical hardware and to the consumers’ mobile phones, allowing them to provide both businesses and consumers with a highly adaptable platform that can provide many convenience features such as simple bill splitting, e-wallet payments, and bank transfers.
Like many early-stage start-ups, Kade Pay was mostly focused on understanding the market and given its broad application, investigating which small/niche markets it could scale the most rapidly in. I was directly involved with this aspect of the company’s operations, working to not only quickly test various markets, but also brainstorm and strategize the numerous opportunities for growth that existed. After making several pivots, we realized that Kade could provide tremendous value to small-medium sized medical practices or other businesses that deal heavily with post service billing. This was because Kade could use its mobile platform to make it much easier for customers to pay these businesses and in return increase the collection rates on debt for our customers.
Over the course of the summer, I gained super valuable experience in both understanding product-market fit, the challenges an early-stage startup might face, fundraising through angel investments, and financial modeling. The skills I have gained over this summer will help me in any of my future endeavors and I am very grateful to have been able to have the experience I did.
This is part of a series of posts by recipients of the 2023 Career Services Summer Funding Grant. We’ve asked funding recipients to reflect on their summer experiences and talk about the industries in which they spent their summer. You can read the entire series here
