Paymob raises US$35m pre-Series C to fund MENA expansion and AI-agent payments

Paymob has raised US$35 million in a pre-Series C round co-led by Mubadala Investment Company and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. British International Investment, Global Ventures and DPI Ventures also participated.

The company will spend the money on two fronts: widening its payments acceptance business across the Middle East and North Africa, and building new products for small and medium-sized merchants.

Building for AI-initiated payments

Part of that product work targets agentic commerce — transactions triggered by AI agents acting on a user's behalf rather than by a person working through a checkout screen. The bet is straightforward: as software assistants take over more of the buying decision, the payment layer has to accept instructions from machines, not only taps from humans.

For SME merchants, the appeal lies in reach rather than engineering effort. Most small businesses have no development team to integrate a new payments rail, so tooling has to arrive through merchant-facing controls.

Twenty thousand merchants since the UAE licence

The Central Bank of the UAE issued Paymob a Retail Payment Services Licence in January 2025. In the months since, the company has onboarded roughly 20,000 merchants across its three GCC markets: the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Oman.

Islam Shawky, co-founder and chief executive of Paymob, said: "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."

Ali Eid Al Mheiri, executive director of UAE Diversified Assets at Mubadala's UAE Investments Platform, said: "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."

Three kinds of capital on the register

The investor list mixes categories. Mubadala brings Abu Dhabi state capital, the EBRD and British International Investment are development finance institutions, and Global Ventures and DPI Ventures are regional venture funds. A pre-Series C normally sits ahead of a priced Series C and carries a company through the final stretch before that larger raise.

No valuation, revenue figure or Series C timeline was disclosed.

The UAE licence now underpins Paymob's Gulf business, with merchant onboarding in Saudi Arabia and Oman running alongside it. Roughly 20,000 merchants have signed up on that footing so far, and the new capital is meant to push that number higher while the agentic commerce tools are still being built.