Paymob Raises $35M Pre-Series C Led by Mubadala and EBRD
The Egyptian payments provider has now raised about $125 million and plans deeper Gulf expansion plus products for small merchants.
Tariq Benali Tariq Benali covers business and corporate news across the UAE and MENA for Anecdoted, tracking the deals, leadership moves and regulatory shifts behind the region's companies. tariq@anecdoted.com
Paymob, an Egyptian payments infrastructure company, has raised $35 million in a pre-Series C round, bringing its total funding to roughly $125 million.
Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi sovereign investor, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) co-led the round. British International Investment, Global Ventures and DPI Ventures also participated. The company announced the raise on Monday.
The new money follows $72 million raised in Series B funding across two tranches: $50 million in 2022 and a $22 million extension in 2024.
Paymob will put the proceeds into widening its digital payments acceptance business across the Middle East and North Africa, and into new products aimed at small and medium-sized merchants as well as agentic commerce, where software agents carry out transactions on a customer's behalf.
"This Pre-Series C funding round will help us accelerate our growth plan across the MENA region and fast-track our product roadmap," said Islam Shawky, cofounder and CEO of Paymob.
What Paymob does
Alain El Hajj, Islam Shawky and Mostafa El Menessy founded the company in 2015. Merchants use its payment gateway, point-of-sale terminals, SoftPOS software and payment links to accept payments and manage their finances. The platform connects to more than 60 payment methods.
Paymob operates in Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Oman, and serves more than 390,000 merchants. Its footprint stretches from North Africa into the Gulf, and the Gulf has driven most of its recent growth.
Growth in the Gulf
Consolidated revenue has tripled over the past 18 months across those four markets, while revenue from the Gulf Cooperation Council states grew sevenfold. GCC markets now account for close to half of the company's total revenue.
Since it obtained a Retail Payment Services Licence from the Central Bank of the UAE in January 2025, Paymob has onboarded about 20,000 merchants across its three GCC markets.
The company placed 30th in a 2025 ranking of the region's 50 largest fintech companies.
A slower venture market
The round lands in a cooling funding environment. Startups across MENA raised $1.35 billion across 214 deals in the first half of 2026, a 22% fall in value year over year, while deal activity dropped 41%, according to the research firm MAGNiTT.
Fintech companies in the region raised $617 million across 57 deals over the same six months. That is 9% less than a year earlier, and deal count halved. The UAE and Saudi Arabia took 85% of MENA fintech funding, pulling in $523 million between them.
