In a significant endorsement of Middle Eastern payment infrastructure, financial technology provider Paymob has officially closed a $35 million Pre-Series C funding round. The round was co-led by Abu Dhabi-based sovereign investor Mubadala Investment Company and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), with additional participation from British International Investment (BII), Global Ventures, and DPI Ventures.
The capital injection follows an 18-month period of operational scaling for the platform. During this timeframe, Paymob tripled its consolidated revenues across its four core markets, while its Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) revenues surged sevenfold. GCC operations now generate nearly half of the company’s total revenue, driven largely by merchant onboarding following Paymob’s acquisition of a Retail Payment Services Licence from the Central Bank of the UAE (CBUAE) in January 2025. Since securing the UAE license, the provider has onboarded approximately 20,000 merchants across its three active GCC markets.
Eliminating Merchant Fragmentation Across Emerging Corridors
Merchants operating across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have historically struggled against a deeply fragmented payments environment. To maintain competitive checkout conversion, businesses typically must manage seven to eight distinct payment methods—spanning Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) platforms, local card schemes, and bank installment plans—each requiring separate contract negotiations, API integrations, and reconciliation schedules.
Paymob addresses this structural friction by unifying fragmented rails into a single technology layer. Through a single contract, one API, and a unified dashboard, merchants gain immediate access to more than 60 localized online and offline payment methods. Today, the omnichannel platform supports over 390,000 merchants across Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Oman, allowing enterprise and SME clients to process transactions, manage working capital, and scale across borders.
“Paymob morphed into a regional platform over the past 18 months, propelled by the exponential growth of our GCC business,” stated Islam Shawky, co-founder and chief executive officer of Paymob. “This Pre-Series C funding round will help us accelerate our growth plan across the MENA region and fast-track our product roadmap to become the go-to payments platform for agentic commerce.”
Sovereign Backing and the Shift Toward Agentic Commerce
The addition of Mubadala to Paymob’s cap table signals growing sovereign confidence in domestic financial software rails as a catalyst for economic diversification. The funding will be channeled into expanding Paymob’s core merchant acceptance gateway, introducing specialized working capital products for SMEs, and building specialized infrastructure tailored for agentic commerce—where autonomous AI software agents initiate and execute transactions on behalf of consumers and businesses.
“Paymob’s expansion in the UAE aligns closely with our ambition under our MENA Venture Capital Fund, to support companies that strengthen the country’s digital economy and reinforce its position as a leading regional fintech hub,” noted Ali Eid Al Mheiri, executive director, UAE diversified assets at Mubadala’s UAE Investments Platform. “With a scalable payments platform and strong growth potential across the GCC, Paymob is well positioned to support merchants, advance financial inclusion and contribute to economic diversification.”
“Paymob has built the payments infrastructure that MENA’s SME economy has been missing, a single, scalable layer that removes friction for merchants and unlocks growth across markets that have historically been underserved by digital finance,” added Bruno Lusic, VC and growth investor at the EBRD.
Founded in 2015 by Islam Shawky, Alain El Hajj, and Mostafa Menessy, Paymob has established an institutional investor base that includes PayPal Ventures, Kora Capital, Clay Point Capital, FMO, A15, and Helios Digital Ventures alongside its current Pre-Series C backers. By combining sovereign capital with a multi-rail acceptance network, Paymob is positioning itself as a foundational payments engine for digital trade across MENA.
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