Founder and CEO, Stream. How businesses get paid.
“Most of the world's innovation in payments has focused on how people spend,” Ibrahim has said. “We're focused on how businesses get paid.” That is the whole company in two sentences, and it is a more unglamorous problem than the consumer side, which is exactly why it was still open.
He founded Stream in 2024 to automate the part of a business nobody enjoys: issuing an invoice, scheduling the payment, collecting it on local rails, reconciling it and keeping the record, with the tax authority integration built in rather than bolted on. It raised a four million dollar seed in November 2025 led by Outliers VC, with BYLD Ventures and angel investors including Careem's co-founder Abdullah Elyas, and has reported forty per cent month-on-month growth.
Stream began with early childhood education and grew into school networks and software businesses, which is a useful detail for an arriving family: the schools taking their fees are increasingly doing it through infrastructure he built. Manara's own client payments run on Stream.