About Pressend

We didn't
improve payments.
We replaced them.

Pressend was founded on one radical belief — that the act of paying for something should be invisible. No cards, no PINs, no friction. Just you, your intent, and the world responding.

1M+

Active Users

$3M

Total Raised

Countries

2025

Founded

99.9%

Platform uptime
since launch

0.3s

Avg. transaction

340+

Team members

$2.1B

Payments processed

Our Mission

Making money move
as fast as thought.

We believe the future of commerce isn't faster cards or slicker apps — it's the complete removal of the payment moment. Pressend is building the infrastructure that makes money invisible, instant, and inherently safe for every human on the planet.

The most powerful technology disappears into the background of life. We want payments to do exactly that.

— Ishmael Onwe, CEO & Co-Founder

Biometric-First Identity

Your face, palm, and fingerprint are the only credentials that matter. No passwords, no cards, no remembering anything.

Our Story

From a dorm room idea
to a global movement.

2025

The Beginning

An engineer, one obsession

towards speed, wrote the first lines of Pressend on a napkin. The idea: payments should be faster than blinking. The name stuck.

First prototype built in 6 weeks

Dec 2025

Seed Round

$1M seed to prove it's real

Backed by group of fintech angels, Pressend launched its closed beta with 200 users in Nigeria. The face-payment feature worked — and users refused to go back to cards. Retention was 94% in the first month.

Ranked 2% for human-dependency & safety cases

2022

Series B — $85M

Panic Account & international expansion

We launched Panic Mode after consulting with safety advocates, domestic abuse survivors, and law enforcement. The feature went viral. Simultaneously, Pressend expanded across Nigeria — our fastest-growing market. Processed first 3M+ in a single month.

TIME 100 Most Influential Companies

2026

Series C

Palm Pay and the biometric revolution

We shipped palmprint payment — fully on-device, zero cloud biometric storage. 500,000 palmprint registrations in the first week. Expanded to Enugu, Delta, and Lagos. Launched the Pressend Merchant Portal with multi-branch support for enterprise retailers.

1 million active users milestone

Mar 2026

Today

2.4M users. 1 countries. Just getting started.

Pressend processes over $2.1 billion in payments annually. We operate WalkOut stores across 3 continents, power thousands of merchant dashboards, and protect millions of people with Panic Mode. Our mission hasn't changed.

Preparing for Series D & global licensing

What We Stand For

Six principles that
drive every decision.

Speed is a feature

Every millisecond of payment friction is a failure. We obsess over latency, not just reliability. Our benchmark: faster than a blink. Our current average: 0.3 seconds end-to-end.

Privacy by architecture

We process biometrics on-device. Your face and palm never leave your phone. Not because the law requires it — because it's the only ethical way to build this product.

Safety for the vulnerable

Panic Mode wasn't a feature request — it was a moral obligation. We build safety tools not because they're marketable but because we have a responsibility to the most vulnerable users first.

Infrastructure for everyone

The unbanked are not an afterthought. Pressend's NFC and biometric stack works on ₦75,000 Android phones without an internet connection. Financial inclusion is a design constraint, not a PR initiative.

Open by default

We publish our security audits. We share our fraud data with regulators. Openness builds the ecosystem that no single company can build alone.

Think in decades

We make decisions for the company we want to be in 2040, not just the metrics we want to hit next quarter. That's why we invest in infrastructure others skip, and say no to growth strategies that compromise trust.

The People

Built by obsessive.
Guided by principle.

3 people across the Nigeria, united by one belief: that payments should disappear.

Ishmael Onwe

CEO & Co-Founder

Ex-Lead Engr at Careerontrack AI. MIT Media Lab PhD dropout. Wrote the first Pressend prototype on a MacBook in a Abakaliki in 4 days.

Under the Hood

Technology that
earns your trust.

Pressend's infrastructure is built from first principles — not assembled from third-party APIs. Every layer, from biometric processing to fraud detection, is owned, audited, and operated by us.

On-Device Biometrics

Face and palm templates are encrypted on your device. No biometric data ever leaves your phone.

Custom NFC Protocol

Our open-source PressendNFC v2 handles handshake, auth, and transfer in under 180ms on any hardware.

Computer Vision Engine

WalkOut uses our in-house CV model trained on 4M+ store scenarios. 99.2% item recognition accuracy.

Real-Time Fraud AI

Every transaction is scored in 12ms by our ML fraud model. False positive rate: 0.003%.

Live System Status

API Latency

2-18ms

▼ 2ms from avg

Fraud Score

0.003%

▼ Industry avg 0.08%

Transactions/sec

4,820

▲ 12% this hour

Active Sessions

82,441

▲ Peak load

Platform Uptime (90 days) 99.97%

Security Certifications

PCI DSS L1 ISO 27001 SOC 2 TYPE II GDPR

What People Say

Real users. Real words.

I used Panic Mode twice in three months. I can't talk about the details. But both times it worked exactly as described — the terminal showed a decline, and my emergency contact got the alert and my location within seconds. Pressend literally changed what I thought was possible from a payments app.

Anonymous

Pressend user, Lagos Nigeria

We installed WalkOut in our three Lagos branches in six weeks. Revenue per location is up 34% because people aren't abandoning carts at checkout. The merchant dashboard is the best business tool I've used in 15 years of retail.

Biodun Okafor

Owner, FreshMart Retail Chain

I reviewed Pressend's security architecture for a WIRED feature. What I found was genuinely rare — a consumer app with enterprise-grade, audited, on-device biometrics. The fact that your face template never touches their servers is not marketing. It's architecture. I've verified it.

Marcus Hernandez

Security Researcher, WIRED

We didn't
improve payments.
We replaced them.

Making money move
as fast as thought.

From a dorm room idea
to a global movement.

Six principles that
drive every decision.

Built by obsessive.
Guided by principle.

Technology that
earns your trust.

Real users. Real words.

$3M raised from
the best in the world.

Ready to make payments
disappear?

We didn't improve payments. We replaced them.

Making money moveas fast as thought.

From a dorm room ideato a global movement.

Six principles thatdrive every decision.

Built by obsessive.Guided by principle.

Technology thatearns your trust.

Real users. Real words.

$3M raised fromthe best in the world.

Ready to make paymentsdisappear?

We didn't
improve payments.
We replaced them.

Making money move
as fast as thought.

From a dorm room idea
to a global movement.

Six principles that
drive every decision.

Built by obsessive.
Guided by principle.

Technology that
earns your trust.

$3M raised from
the best in the world.

Ready to make payments
disappear?