Cork-founded fintech Qashio survived drone attacks in Dubai — and is now creating 50 jobs in Ireland
Lydia Foott and Armin Moradi of Qashio.
Experts will tell you that resilience planning should be built into every business plan. But a drone blasting out your data centre isn’t usually part of the scenario modelling.
That was the reality facing growing international fintech Qashio - a company co-founded in July 2022 by Lydia Fott, from Riverstick in Co Cork, and her business partner Armin Moradi from Stockholm - as the Iran conflict spilled into Dubai in late February. Their business plan was put to the test when a drone sent from Iran hit their data centre in the Dubai desert, and a day later their recovery data site was targeted and hit by a second wave of drone attack.
“As an organisation, we had worked very hard on business continuity. We never thought of war really, but part of the business continuity scenarios you do, war is there,” said Armin.
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“So through the resilience measures that we had in place, we made sure that the back end and the data would be protected from any further risk. But we never thought that the data recovery site would be hit - like it has never happened before in the history of mankind. It's like when you read the training material and it says 'this will never happen, but if it did happen, this is what you should do'. So, immediately, we started to work on a contingency plan.
"I don't want to romanticise the situation because it was horrible and it was definitely scary. A lot of loud noises. But we were probably well prepared for a difficult situation, more prepared than many."
Qashio is an advance payments and credit control platform for companies. It works as a spend management platform which allows finance teams to issue corporate credit cards instantly with pre-configured limits. The pair launched the product in the Gulf four years ago and are now setting up their European headquarters in Ireland.
Lydia, who has lived in Dubai for the past 16 years, says that for most expats on the ground, life adjusted to a new normal amid the rising conflict.
“There was a lot of worried mothers and fathers calling, trying to figure out what was going on, but on the ground here, that really wasn't that same kind of feeling. My sister and her husband were visiting with their daughter at the time. For me, that was part of the worry - they were supposed to leave on March 1 and this happened on Feburary 28. So there was a challenge of trying to get them on a flight and get out. They did get on that first flight out that went from Dubai to Dublin.
"The Irish business network here in Dubai also has a really great kind of community that helped to keep us informed and was another lifeline.
But our business kept running. You know, we still had our customers to serve. Life had to go on. We still had to go and do the grocery shopping and all the housework still needed to get done. So yeah, it was, it kind of became a strange normality in that it felt very reminiscent of covid.
"I personally don't know anyone that packed up and left during that time. There was a large population of British people that left. But after those first few days, I think we understood that we were probably safer here than a lot of other places we could have been globally.”
The company only went to market in July 2022, but Qashio has has come through a big test of resilience. It is on target for $70m (€60m) revenue this year, and its expansion into Europe getting underway with the launch of its Dublin office this week, with plans to invest over $10m (€8.6m) into Ireland and create more than 50 jobs this year, and double that next year.
“Our initial plan is 50 within the next 12 to 18 months. And then, all going well, we will continue to build out from there, and the sky's the limit," said Lydia.
Joining Lydia as part of a business delegation for meetings in Cork and Dublin this week will be Aaron Buckley from Ballygarvan, another expatriate Corkman and a sales manager for Qashio in Dubai. Qashio believes the solution will fit easily into the Irish marketplace.
“One of the key things that we've done is we've built our own loyalty program,” explains Lydia. “It's our own currency called Qashio Points. The earning mechanism is quite straightforward: spend on your Qashio cards, you're earning against every transaction. Then the business can redeem those across our exchange partners including Emirates, Accor Hotels, IHG Hotels, Etihad, British Airways, Jumeriah. So the value proposition is obviously controlling their spend and being able to reconcile it quickly but on top of that, they can get something back from that spend as well.”
Qashio secured a $19m investment to support the European product expansion. This week, Qashio is also a sponsor of the Dublin Tech Summit, where Armin will be a speaker. Earlier in his career, Armin lived in Dublin while working at Oracle, so he still has friends here. But the decision to bring Qashio made sense from a business standpoint too.
“We looked at Saudi, and the other GCC countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar). But more than 10% of our business has come from Europe without any push. And we kind of came to the conclusion that we need to establish ourselves in Europe to be able to capture a larger market. The European market was what our existing clients were interested in to have a footprint because they have subsidiaries there, they have a significant amount of trade with those countries.
"We had considered Lisbon, Stockholm, and Amsterdam. And then we started to look at Ireland, where Lydia is from. In Dubai, we operate under English common law, and the Irish law is close to it. Ireland being English speaking also helped - it just made everything easier for us. Additionally, the access to talent is there.
“One of my old colleagues from Oracle in Dublin manages Enterprise Ireland here in UAE and so we got in contact with IDA. They were the only direct foreign investment authority or organisation out of all of the countries that we were talking to at that time that made an effort to come and visit us in the office, and genuinely show interest in what we are doing. They even sent somebody that had worked to bring a similar style company from Japan to Ireland, to show they could really translate our challenges into solutions. And that support was extremely important to us.
“We also get support from the local government here in UAE and they really want to establish that a strong trade route with Ireland, they see a lot of similarities.”
In the Middle East, businesses are looking towards Ireland as a gateway into Europe, and it's a two-way street. In December, Kerry Group set up a state-of-the-art regional centre for research, development and applications at Expo City in Dubai. The growing economic relationship between Ireland and the UAE is now worth almost €8bn in bilateral trade.
In Qashio’s new Dublin office under general manager Kevin Gallagher, the company is launching with its sales team while a research and development centre called Qashio Labs will follow, as all of the company’s development work is done in-house.
“We have a small office space right now in the Lennox Building in Dublin but we're planning to outgrow that pretty quickly,” said Lydia.
This week will be an opportunity for Lydia and her Bahrain-born husband Rehan to bring her five-month-old sold Torin to Ireland again, and visit Lydia's parents Dan and Helen. Long term, she expects Cork to play an important role in the expansion of Qashio.
“We want to have a satellite office in Cork, specifically for sales and customer service. So that is the next step on the roadmap.
“We have a strategy for Cork specifically to roll out to businesses there. Obviously, Cork is an important base for pharmaceuticals, and we have a lot of clients in pharmaceutical and tech, but there's also a huge market of SME that isn't yet served with our type of solution.”
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