Artificial intelligence expert and entrepreneur Kamal Nahas is determined to redefine the face of consumer AI with PAP!
Together with his co-founder, Anthony Rassi, he's building AI agents that work on your behalf to find and reclaim savings you're already eligible for, intelligently gathering purchase information from emails and handling the claims process completely autonomously. The result is AI agents that work to get you paid—without you having to lift a finger.
This is Kamal's journey from a teenager solving logistics challenges in Lebanon to a Y Combinator-backed AI entrepreneur leading a $20M-valued company.
From Teenage Coding Competitions to Artificial Intelligence Engineer
Kamal Nahas got his start in consumer tech at the age of 15. In Beirut, Lebanon, he created a service that allowed high school students to order products from Amazon—even though the global commerce giant didn't yet ship to Lebanon.
Recognizing a key gap in the market he could solve with computer science, Kamal built an algorithmic system that connected frequent travelers between Lebanon and Paris with customers looking to buy international products. His solution quickly went viral among students, generating five figures in revenue.
Kamal went on to pursue a degree in electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley, where he excelled in machine learning and software development. He was even appointed as a lab instructor for Berkeley's "Foundations of Machine Learning to Interact with a Dynamic World," playing a vital role in educating over 1,100 students.
Outside his academic pursuits, he consulted for billion-dollar startups like Handshake and Namely at just 18 years old, assembling a team of alumni engineers from Meta, Google, and TikTok. In 2023, he worked as a machine learning and security engineer at Apple, where he built tools atop an infrastructure that handled over hundreds of millions of users globally. In just a few short months, he saved over 500 engineering hours by transforming previously invisible machine assets into trackable, secure systems.
Kamal also served as an investment partner at Immersion Partners and led the expansion of top venture firms into Berkeley's engineering and startup ecosystem, helping founders raise their first rounds of equity and connect top technical talent with breakout companies.
Now, he's co-founder and CEO of PAP!, an AI-powered platform that works on your behalf to get you paid. The company has raised $2.6 million at a $20 million post-money valuation and is backed by investors like Y Combinator, General Catalyst, NFX, and the founder of Truebill.
How PAP! Leverages Artificial Intelligence to Reclaim Hidden Savings
What happens when a product you buy online goes on sale right after you buy it? Most American consumers simply treat it as bad luck, but Kamal and his team saw it as an opportunity.
"Most retailers have a price adjustment policy that entitles consumers to a partial refund in this scenario," says Kamal. "But the majority of consumers don't know that. They're missing out on opportunities related to nearly every product category, and billions go unclaimed every year."
Developing a solution for this, however, has proved challenging in the past. Most consumer fintech apps rely on banking and credit card statements for data inputs, but these statements don't provide enough information for a tool to find the specific products and hunt for post-purchase refunds. Email receipts do provide that detail, but bring up another challenge—one that, until PAP!, seemed impossible to solve at scale.
"Emails are highly unstructured data," Kamal explains. "Retailers aren't bound to a standard format, so every email receipt looks different. In the past, parsing them at scale required building bespoke parsers for every retailer."
The solution required Kamal to embark on a fundamental shift in how unstructured email data is parsed—from using deterministic and hard-coded parsers to using self-learning AI. Through this step forward, they unlocked a reported accuracy of 98.8% when analyzing receipts to understand consumer spending.
PAP! is the culmination of this research, a generalized agentic machine capable of navigating non-deterministic workflows to complete real-world financial tasks. Thanks to its unique ability to learn where to find key information in the receipt, no matter the template, PAP! can parse nearly every retailer's receipt template. It learns where to find the relevant data on its own, then dynamically applies what it finds to the next time it parses receipts. It also pioneers financial claim automation technology, helping consumers reclaim their owed savings without users having to lift a finger.
Within months, tens of thousands of users had signed up for PAP!, and since its release, it's parsed the receipts of more than 300 retailers and saved its users an average of more than $20 per month.
The Future for Kamal Nahas: A Personal AI-Powered CFO That Could Upend Consumer Fintech
PAP! is just one piece of a larger infrastructure that Kamal calls a "personal AI CFO" approach. In an ideal scenario, customers have a digital AI financial expert by their side for all transactions, finding not just discounts after the fact but the best deal from the very beginning.
To this end, Kamal developed Linda, a pre-purchase optimization system that hunts for discounts and applies all relevant coupons automatically after a simple product input from users. This means that every time a consumer wants to buy something, Linda helps them find the best deal. And every time a product goes on sale after the purchase, and the consumer is entitled to a discount, PAP! puts money back in their pocket.
Kamal sees the next logical step as enabling AI to make purchases completely autonomously: navigating checkout flows, placing orders, and managing delivery. It's a turning point from using AI as a guide in shopping to AI acting as the buyer itself, laying the foundation for a future where software doesn't just influence commerce—it participates in it.
It's all part of his long-term ambition to create a new, AI-powered labor force that's dedicated to working on your behalf. From autonomously claiming refunds to buying for you at a discount, it's a mission to build an AI CFO that earns you money, manages your spending, and makes smarter financial decisions for you in the background.
It takes a leading technical founder in AI-powered consumer fintech to achieve goals like this, and Kamal Nahas's work at PAP! is not only transforming personal finance but redefining how AI can create tangible value for everyday consumers.
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