Paymob Raises $35M Pre-Series C Led by Mubadala and EBRD

Paymob has closed a US$35 million pre-Series C round. Mubadala Investment Company and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development co-led the financing.

British International Investment, Global Ventures and DPI Ventures took part as well.

The capital goes in two directions. Paymob intends to widen its payments acceptance business across the Middle East and North Africa, and to build out a set of products aimed at small and medium-sized merchants.

Tools for software that pays

Some of those SME products are designed for agentic commerce: purchases in which an AI agent initiates the payment on a user's behalf instead of a person tapping through a checkout.

The distinction bites at the authorization step. A processor handling an agent-initiated transaction has to establish that software, not a human, holds the delegated right to spend, and has to do it inside roughly the same window as a card tap.

Islam Shawky, Paymob's co-founder and chief executive, said the round would accelerate the company's expansion plan for the region and compress its product roadmap, with the aim of making Paymob a default payments platform for agentic commerce.

Gulf merchants and a UAE licence

Paymob has held a Retail Payment Services Licence from the Central Bank of the UAE since January 2025. A licence in-market lets a payments company sign and serve merchants directly rather than working through a local partner's permissions.

Across its three Gulf markets — the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Oman — Paymob has onboarded about 20,000 merchants since that licence came through.

The investor case

Ali Eid Al Mheiri, Executive Director of UAE Diversified Assets at Mubadala's UAE Investments Platform, described the platform as scalable and said the company has strong potential for growth in the Gulf. He said Paymob is placed to support merchants, extend access to financial services and contribute to economic diversification.

Acceptance is the layer where payment volume tends to compound, because every additional merchant brings transaction flow that stays. Paymob's Gulf count suggests the UAE licence has done what licences are meant to do: turn regulatory permission into signed merchants. The agentic commerce half of the plan is the less certain one. It rests on AI agents becoming a genuine route to retail spending in the region, and on processors and card networks settling how a delegated spending mandate travels through authorization. Part of this round is a bet that both happen.