WhatsApp is where India does business. Family transactions, freelance gigs, B2B deals, small e-commerce. It’s also where most of those deals quietly break: scope creep without a contract, milestones nobody committed to in writing, payments that arrive late, partially, or not at all.
Adv. Afham Kavil, 29, a practising advocate with the Kerala Bar Association, ran into this gap from the buyer’s side. His mother saw a churidar ad on YouTube Shorts, paid ₹2,500, and received a plain red cloth. No support, no refund, no recourse. The same month, Afham himself lost ₹10,000 to a freelancer he’d hired on LinkedIn: brief, agreement, partial payment, then silence. Both losses were real. Both were too small for the legal system to actually protect.
“My mother got scammed ₹2,500. I’m a lawyer. And I could not help her.”
Adv. Afham Kavil · Co-founder, Pakka AI
Riza Mohamed T, 17, a high school student in Kerala, had spent two years building AI agents for clients across India and abroad, watching the same trust gap close deal after deal from the builder’s side. Everyone was just hoping the other side wouldn’t go silent. Nobody was building a system designed for everyday WhatsApp deals.
Riza and Adv. Afham Kavil first met five years ago at a Kerala startup event, when Riza was still in school and Afham was building his edtech startup. They lost touch. Years later, both deep in the same trust-gap problem from opposite sides, they reconnected at YC Startup School 2026. The real conversation moved to WhatsApp, fitting because that’s exactly where every Pakka deal happens too. Riza took on the build. Afham came in as legal co-founder. Both Kerala-based, 12 years apart in age, opposite sides of the same trust gap.