Plouton AI and the second act of a Karachi fintech pair
Two Habib University graduates spent four years trying to get young Pakistanis to buy mutual funds. Now they sell finance teams a robot that works the browser for them.
Plouton AI is, on paper, a very young company. LinkedIn records it as founded in 2025 with a handful of staff in Singapore; the data provider Preqin puts the founding year at 2024. Its public launch, on Product Hunt, came on 11 May 2026. But the two men behind it have been building financial products together since they were undergraduates in Karachi.
The first company
Muhammad Furqan Karim Kidwai and Sarfraz Shahid Hussain graduated from Habib University in 2020 with degrees in computer science, both on full TOPS scholarships, according to the university. In August 2020 they founded YPay Financial Services, an app that let first time investors put money into mutual funds without paperwork, operating out of the National Incubation Center in Karachi, ProPakistani reported.
The idea needed a regulator's blessing. YPay joined the first cohort of the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan's regulatory sandbox, which it ran from late 2020 to mid 2021 with 100,000 individuals, according to Habib University, and piloted with more than five financial institutions. Money came from the US accelerator On Deck at a valuation of 2 million dollars at the end of 2021. ProPakistani's headline called the round seven figures while the National Incubation Center's own note called it six figures, and no exact amount was ever published. The startup then joined the Singapore accelerator Iterative in its summer 2022 batch, according to Iterative's portfolio page, and CB Insights lists a second seed round in July 2022 and an accelerator round from ITCN Asia that August.
After that the public record goes quiet. YPay's website no longer resolves, and we found no reporting on its user numbers or whether the app still operates.
From the regulator's sandbox to the finance desk
Forbes, in its profile of the company, says Kidwai started the new venture after seeing that finance teams in many emerging markets still ran on spreadsheets and email. Plouton's answer is not another piece of software to integrate. Its agents use the browser and the desktop the way a junior accountant would, logging into Xero, QuickBooks, NetSuite or Excel and carrying out invoicing, payroll processing, three way invoice matching and bank reconciliations, with a human approving steps and an audit trail of screenshots and recordings, according to Forbes, Habib University and the company's Product Hunt listing.
The company is backed by Antler Singapore, a fact repeated by Forbes and every Pakistani outlet that covered the founders. How much Antler invested is less clear. Dealroom's news feed carried a headline that Plouton had raised 125,000 dollars led by Antler Singapore, with 25,000 dollars in annual recurring revenue from a pilot and four clients across Asia Pacific, the Middle East and North America. Preqin's profile describes a pre seed of 1.25 million dollars in December 2025. The two figures differ by a factor of ten and we could not reach the underlying filing or statement, so neither should be treated as settled. Habib University's description in June 2026, very early stage with early revenue, is the safest summary.
What the list changes
In late May 2026 Forbes placed Kidwai and Hussain on its 30 Under 30 Asia list in the finance and venture capital category, two of seven Pakistanis on the list that year, Dawn and Business Recorder reported. The company's Product Hunt launch two weeks earlier had reached fifteenth on the daily leaderboard with 97 upvotes.
The division of labour is the same one the pair settled on in Karachi. Kidwai, a former Deloitte financial analyst, leads finance, sales and marketing and is listed as chief executive on Product Hunt. Hussain leads technical execution. Their first company tried to teach a generation of Pakistanis to save. The second one is betting that the people who count the money would rather not do it by hand.
