Muhammad Furqan Karim Kidwai had not yet finished his degree when he and a classmate began building a company. Six years after graduating, he is cofounder and chief executive of Plouton AI, a Singapore startup that builds software agents to do the work of a finance department: raising invoices, processing payroll and reconciling the books at the end of the month.
His path there ran through Karachi. He studied computer science at Habib University on a full scholarship, worked briefly as a financial analyst at Deloitte, and in 2020 helped start YPay Financial Services, an app that let first time investors in Pakistan put small sums into mutual funds from their phones. The company attracted American money and a Singapore accelerator. It then became hard to trace.
In 2026 Kidwai and his cofounder, Sarfraz Shahid Hussain, were named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list. The recognition is the most visible sign of a founder who has now built two companies, one for savers and one for the people who keep company accounts.
Two scholars and a degree in computer science
Kidwai and Hussain were computer science students at Habib University in Karachi, both on the university's TOPS scholarship, which paid for four years of study in full, according to a Habib University press release from January 2022. They graduated in 2020. In August of that year they registered YPay Financial Services.
Before that, Kidwai had spent time at Deloitte as a financial analyst, according to Habib University and a DealBeat profile published in August 2026. DealBeat says the work was on IFRS 9 modelling, the accounting standard for expected credit losses, and that he later completed intensive data science studies at Stanford University, a detail the magazine could not confirm elsewhere. The experience gave him a view of how finance teams spend their days, and Plouton AI is aimed at exactly those teams. The route from analyst to software founder is not unusual in itself. What is notable is how early he started.
A sandbox, a licence and a valuation
YPay pitched itself as paperwork free investing with free advice for people who had never bought a fund. It was accepted into the first cohort of the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan's regulatory sandbox, which it ran from late 2020 to mid 2021 with about 100,000 individuals, according to Habib University. It worked out of the National Incubation Center in Karachi, which DealBeat lists as its fifth cohort, and ProPakistani said it was mentored by Jehan Ara, founder of Nest I/O.
ProPakistani reported on 30 December 2021 that the company had closed a pre seed round from the US accelerator ODX, also known as On Deck, at a valuation of $2 million, with the deal done remotely in about two weeks. The same article said the team had been interviewed and shortlisted by Y Combinator around the same time, without saying they were accepted. Kidwai served as cofounder and chief operating officer. After the round he described the relief of having enough runway.
“We are relieved in the sense that we have enough money to go commercially live and work full time.”
Preaching mutual funds on campus
Habib University used his title when he returned on 10 November 2022 to speak at an event called Learn and Earn with YPay, organised by its Entrepreneurship Society and Young Leaders Club. The university's account has him lamenting the lack of knowledge of entrepreneurship and investment in Pakistan, saying the country had the lowest saving ratio among those he compared, and calling the Pakistan Stock Exchange a volatile instrument. His advice to students was to consider mutual funds, which he said offered instant diversification and lower risk for first time investors.
The pitch was consistent with the product. YPay described itself, in that account, as a platform for simplified investing and saving aimed mainly at young people, with the stated aim of helping build a financially stable Pakistan.
The Singapore turn
YPay joined Iterative, a Singapore accelerator, in its summer 2022 batch, according to Iterative's portfolio page, which still describes it as the easiest investing app for Pakistan. What happened to YPay after that is harder to trace. Its website no longer resolves and this profile found no coverage of its user numbers or operating status after 2022.
Moving to Singapore to automate the finance desk
By 2025 Kidwai and Hussain had moved on to Plouton AI, a Singapore company backed by Antler Singapore. LinkedIn gives its founding year as 2025 and its address as Prinsep Street in central Singapore. Forbes describes the product as auditable, browser based agents that run invoicing, payroll processing and month end reconciliation inside tools companies already use, such as Xero, QuickBooks and Excel. Habib University adds that the agents are set up like employees and can be taught a task through plain language or a screen recording, and that the company aims to be the default operating system for the offices of chief financial officers at midmarket companies, in Asia Pacific first.
The pitch is to companies that would rather not buy costly enterprise software. Instead of asking them to change systems, the agents work inside the tools they have. Auditability matters because an accountant has to be able to see what a machine did and why, and finance is the kind of work where an unexplained error is worse than a slow answer.
Kidwai leads finance, sales and marketing, according to Habib University, and his Product Hunt profile lists him as cofounder and chief executive. Plouton launched on Product Hunt on 11 May 2026 and finished fifteenth on the day's leaderboard. The company says it is very early stage with early revenue, and it claims its agents work ten times faster and ten times cheaper than the alternative. No customers or funding amounts are public.
What Forbes saw
Forbes placed the pair on its 30 Under 30 Asia list for 2026 in the finance and venture capital category, a selection reported by Dawn, Business Recorder and Arab News on 30 and 31 May 2026. Dawn counted seven Pakistanis on the list. Kidwai told Habib University in June 2026 that about 4,000 nominations were considered for 300 places, that applications opened in December, and that he and Hussain learned they had made the list only when it was published. His advice to would be nominees was that a good story gets read.
He was equally direct about how he chose a cofounder, and about dividing a company between two people.
“I need someone to take care of the things that are my weakness.”
DealBeat reported in August 2026 that Kidwai received a Youth Excellence Award from the Prime Minister's Youth Programme, presented on International Youth Day, and that Plouton was among forty companies chosen to pitch at the Deel Pitch Singapore regional finals. This profile could not confirm either from a second source, and readers should treat them as the outlet's reports.
The second company, the same discipline
There is a thread between the two companies. YPay was about making a regulated activity, investing in funds, simple enough for people with little experience of it. Plouton is about making a repetitive and rule bound activity, bookkeeping, simple enough that a small team does not need a large department. Both are exercises in taking paperwork out of a financial process.
The difference is where the customer is. YPay served individuals, and its regulatory sandbox was a Pakistani proving ground. Plouton is a Singapore company aimed at finance teams. Moving there changed the customer, and with it the competition and the price a product can command.
What comes next
Plouton is young, and the claims around it are early ones. Whether browser based agents can be trusted with payroll at scale, and whether customers will accept them inside books that regulators and auditors inspect, are open questions for the whole category. The company's answer, by Forbes's description, is auditable agents that leave a record of what they did.
For Kidwai the task over the next few years is to turn a launch, a list and an accelerator backing into a customer base that renews. He has done one version of that before, in a different country and a different product, and left the first company behind. His standing now depends on what Plouton's agents do with real companies' books, not on the awards that surround the launch.
