Quick Facts
Biography
Hany Rashwan (Arabic: هاني رشوان; born May 7, 1990) is an Egyptian businessman, entrepreneur, and computer engineer. He is the founder of the social commerce company Ribbon and enterprise fintech company Payout.
Early life and education
Rashwan was born in Cairo, Egypt and grew up in Alexandria. His grandfather, a career intelligence officer in the Egyptian army and an expert at cryptography and programming, bought Rashwan his first computer aged 11 and taught him basic programming. After moving to the United States for high school, he built two gaming sites aged 14, with one attracting 600,000 unique annual visitors and advertising revenue.
He attended Ohio State University to study economics and computer science, before transferring to Columbia University. In 2017, he was named to the 2017 Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the Enterprise Technology category for his work on Payout.
Companies
Kolena
While an undergraduate, Rashwan built Kolena (meaning "all of us" in Arabic), an online interactive town-hall using Facebook Connect that was used by tens of thousands of Egyptians during the Egyptian revolution. In an interview, Rashwan envisioned Kolena serving as “Egypt’s online interactive Town Hall Meeting…a place for people to go to submit and vote on ideas for change."
Ribbon
Ribbon was a payments startup that let users sell online using a shortened URL that can be shared across email, social media and a seller's own website. The service focuses on bringing integrated checkouts directly to platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter letting buyers purchase without leaving those services. Ribbon has been featured in publications including Techcrunch, Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, The Next Web, and ArsTechnica.
After the company announced support for "in-stream" payments on Twitter, allowing buyers to purchase items without leaving the Twitter.com stream, Twitter shut down Ribbon's API access after approximately an hour and a half.
Payout
Founded in late 2014, Payout provides online lenders with a payouts, disbursements and compliance API that is used by top online lenders such as LendUp and Prosper. Lenders are able to push money to consumers' credit cards in real-time. The company moved more than $50 million in loans by its second year. Payout went through the AngelPad accelerator and subsequently raised $4.75 million, led by Tim Draper of Draper Associates.