Paymob closes $50M in funding, the largest ever Series B fundraise by an Egyptian fintech startup company

Paymob, a Cairo, Egypt-based fintech startup and Egypt’s market-leading digital payments provider, announced today it has closed a $50 million Series B funding round. The round was led by global emerging markets investment firm Kora Capital, PayPal Ventures, and Clay Point led the round.

The announcement comes a year after the fintech startup raised $18.5 million in Series A funding led by Global Ventures, the UAE-based venture capital firm. As we reported back then, PayMob was going through a new phase of growth due to increased demands for its omnichannel merchant financial services.

This time, Paymob told Tech Startups that the new funding capital infusion will be used to turbocharge the company by expanding its product range, reinforcing its leadership in the Egyptian market, and expanding into new markets across the Middle East and Africa region.

The round also comes on the heels of strong growth across the Paymob platform in 2021, with the number of merchants and monthly volumes growing by 4x year-on-year as of December 2021. Paymob onboarded over 100,00 merchants in less than two and half years as part of its plan to reach 1 million SMEs across the region.

Other backers in this round include Helios Digital Ventures, British International Investment, and Nclude. All existing investors including A15, FMO, and Global Ventures also participated.

Founded in 2015 by Alain El Hajj, Islam Shawky, and Mostafa Menessy, Paymob builds an omnichannel payment infrastructure to enable businesses to accept digital payments both online and in-store in addition to giving them better access to financial services.

Paymob is a regional digital payments enabler that builds payments infrastructure technologies empowering the underserved with access to financial services. Paymob is bridging the financial inclusion gap in the MEA region by enabling businesses of all sizes to benefit from the power of digital payments and what it unlocks.

The startup also empowers underserved SMEs with improved and more accessible digital payment offerings as part of the Central Bank of Egypt’s efforts and initiatives toward nationwide digital financial inclusion. The Company will accelerate its expansion in Saudi Arabia and other markets across the region, in 2021.

Paymob’s gateway has the largest number of payment methods in the Egyptian market; in addition to conventional bank cards, Paymob added new payment methods such as mobile wallets, QR payments, bank cards’ installments, Buy-Now Pay-Later, and consumer finance payment options to support merchants in increasing their volume of transactions and growing revenues. Recently, Paymob partnered with Mastercard to introduce Tap-on-Phone in Egypt – the first of its kind in the country and which will start to replace traditional point of sale devices. Paymob plans to launch cards for its merchants to enable B2B transactions and build tools for merchants to better manage and grow their business.

“We are thrilled to complete this significant fundraising with the support of such renowned international investors including, PayPal Ventures, the venture capital arm of a global pioneer in the digital payment space. It is a major endorsement of the strategy we have implemented to date and the scale of the opportunities we can harness,” said Islam Shawky, Paymob’s Co-founder, and CEO. He added that “Central Bank of Egypt initiatives that are continuously being introduced in the market to support fintech companies were key to Paymob’s growth. The Central Bank has created a regulatory framework to help fintech flourish and participate in making Egypt’s digital financial inclusion ambitions a reality.”

Paymob has recently announced its market entry to Pakistan, which has a population of over 220 million, and over 4 million SMEs across the country, and plans to onboard over 100,000 merchants within the first 24 months of launching its operations. This expansion should be followed by additional markets in the GCC and North Africa.

“Paymob shares our mission and ambition of advancing digital payments adoption – it has made impressive strides in supporting the growth and success of underserved SMBs,” said Ashish Aggarwal, Director, PayPal Ventures. “We’re honored to be investing at a critical point in their journey, as Paymob scales game-changing solutions to bridge the fintech gap for businesses across the Middle East and Africa.”

“We are excited to partner with Paymob as they innovate at scale in the offline merchant acquiring and online payment gateway space,” said Nitin Saigal, Founder, Kora Management. “The Paymob team is leveraging key structural changes taking place across Egypt and the Middle East, as these economies evolve from being primarily cash-led to a digital heavy mode of transacting. We look forward to the road ahead.”