Paymob, the digital payments infrastructure provider founded in Egypt, has raised $35m in a pre-Series C funding round as it accelerates its footprint across the Middle East and North Africa.
The capital injection was co-led by Abu Dhabi sovereign investor Mubadala Investment Company and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). British International Investment (BII), Global Ventures, and DPI Ventures also participated in the transaction.
The round brings Paymob’s total disclosed equity funding to more than $125m, following a $50m Series B round in 2022 and a $22m extension led by the EBRD in 2024.
The latest raise highlights a broader strategic pivot by the Cairo-founded company toward the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Paymob reported that consolidated revenues tripled over the past 18 months, supported by a sevenfold increase in revenue from GCC markets, which now account for nearly half of the group’s total receipts.
Founded in 2015 by Islam Shawky, Alain El Hajj, and Mostafa Menessy, Paymob provides software that allows businesses to process online and in-person payments through a single integration layer. The company currently serves over 390,000 merchants across Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Oman.
A key driver of growth in the Gulf followed Paymob securing a Retail Payment Services Licence from the Central Bank of the UAE in January 2025. The permit allowed the company to offer direct merchant acquisition, payment aggregation, and local money transfers in the country. Paymob has since onboarded roughly 20,000 merchants across its three active GCC markets.
The regional payments landscape across Middle Eastern economies remains structurally fragmented. Merchants typically must manage seven to eight disparate payment mechanisms — ranging from buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) schemes and regional card networks to bank instalment systems — each requiring separate commercial agreements, technical setup, and settlement reconciliation. Paymob aggregates more than 60 payment options into a single contract, dashboard, and Application Programming Interface (API).
“Paymob morphed into a regional platform over the past 18 months, propelled by the exponential growth of our GCC business,” said Islam Shawky, chief executive of Paymob, as reported by Arab Finance.
The business plans to allocate the fresh capital toward expanding digital payment acceptance across the region and building new tools for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Part of the technical roadmap will target “agentic commerce” — software infrastructure designed to process transactions initiated autonomously by artificial intelligence agents.
For regional sovereign capital and foreign development finance institutions, the transaction reflects ongoing interest in financial software that unifies trade infrastructure across North Africa and the Gulf.
Ali Eid Al Mheiri, executive director of UAE Diversified Assets at Mubadala’s UAE Investments Platform, noted that the investment aligns with the sovereign fund’s initiative to back financial technology platforms that strengthen regional digital trade.
Bruno Lusic, venture capital investor at the EBRD, said Paymob had built “a single, scalable layer that removes friction for merchants and unlocks growth across markets that have historically been underserved by digital finance.”
Paymob plans to use the capital to deepen its presence in Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the UAE, alongside rolling out supplementary merchant features such as working capital loans, accelerated settlement schedules, and embedded checkout systems.