Paymob raised USD 35 million in a Pre-Series C round co-led by Mubadala and EBRD. The round also saw participation from British International Investment (BII), Global Ventures, and DPI Ventures. This comes as the payments infrastructure provider looks to expand across MENA and develop new products for SMEs and agentic commerce.

Why You Should Care

MENA’s payments infrastructure remains fragmented across markets. Merchants often work with different BNPL providers, local card networks, and bank installment schemes, creating separate integration and settlement processes.

That fragmentation matters as businesses expand across the region. Paymob is building around this gap by bringing more than 60 payment methods onto one platform, with a single contract, API, and dashboard. Its model also combines online and offline payments with transaction and financial management tools.

The Details

Founded in 2015 by Islam Shawky, Alain El Hajj, and Mostafa Menessy, Paymob is a payments infrastructure service provider. It enables businesses to accept online and offline payments, process transactions, manage finances, and access financial services.

It was licensed by the Central Bank of Egypt. It then entered the UAE in 2023 and obtained a license from the Central Bank of the UAE.

Looking ahead, it aims to support its expansion across the MENA region. This through scaling its core digital payments acceptance business. As well as, introducing new product offerings tailored to its SME merchants and catering to agentic commerce. 

“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,”

Islam Shawky, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Paymob

Paymob entered the UAE in 2023 and secured its Retail Payment Services Licence from the Central Bank of the UAE in January 2025. Since obtaining the licence, it says it has onboarded around 20,000 merchants across its three GCC markets.

The Ripple

Paymob’s expansion adds another layer to the development of MENA’s digital payments infrastructure, particularly as businesses increasingly operate across multiple markets with different payment systems.

For Paymob, the focus is shifting from establishing its presence in individual markets to scaling a regional payments platform. Its recent GCC growth and planned product expansion could broaden the range of services available to SMEs through a single technology layer.

The involvement of Mubadala also brings a major regional institutional investor into Paymob’s shareholder base. Meanwhile, EBRD’s participation adds further institutional backing as the company expands beyond its established markets.

What to Watch

The next phase will center on how Paymob converts its recent GCC growth into broader MENA expansion.

Key areas to watch include the rollout of new SME focused products, the development of its agentic commerce offering, and merchant growth across the GCC and other MENA markets. The company’s ability to scale its single platform model across markets with different payment ecosystems will also shape its next stage of growth.